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CQEQUGHT DEH)5ir. 



IMMORTALITY: A STUDY OF BELIEF 



PUBLISHED ON THE FUND GIVEN TO 

THE YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS 

IN MEMORY OF 

M. A. K. 



IMMORTALITY 

A STUDY OF BELIEF 

AND EARLIER ADDRESSES 



BY 

WILLIAM NEWTON CLARKE 




NEW HAVEN 
YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS 

LONDON • HUMPHREY MILFORD • OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS 

MDCCCCXX 



<. 



COPYRIGHT, 1920. BY 
YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS 



©CI.A576^94 



Scr -/ ijcij 



PREFACE 

It is thirty years ago this spring since Dr. Clarke 
preached his first sermon in the old historic church at 
Hamilton, New York, where I was then a student. The 
words with which he began his ministry were, "The grace 
of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the 
communion of the Holy Ghost, be with you all," and for 
three years, Sunday after Sunday, he laid upon us the 
peace and benediction of his spirit. We were not aware 
that one of the foremost religious thinkers of our time 
was offering us the ripest fruits of his experience and 
meditation. The books that were to affect so powerfully 
the thought of our day were not yet written; but we 
knew, those of us, at least, who had ears to hear, that we 
were in the presence of a teacher who spoke to our minds 
and hearts as no teacher had ever done. "A word spoken 
in due season, how good it is !" was one of his texts, and 
a characteristic one. All his words were in season, for 
they were all charged with reality and sincerity, and they 
all "found" us. It seems, as one looks back upon it, as 
if a better type of preaching for college men could hardly 
be imagined, and I rejoice to remember that it seemed so 
then. While the sermon was going forward, one had no 
time to think of the method, so absorbing was the devel- 
opment of the theme, so moving the quiet application of 
it ; but when it was over, one had leisure to reflect upon 
the marvelous simplicity of manner, the faultless ade- 
quacy of phrase. The benign gaze over the congregation ; 
the steady, tranquil voice moving on from point to point ; 
the familiar gesture with two hands, as if he were visibly 
moulding and shaping the idea before us ; the directness, 
the transparent honesty, the absolute genuineness— one 

vii 



PREFACE 

noted and loved them then, one remembers them how 
vividly now ! He writes, in a letter of 1897 : "I preached 
this morning ... on 'the secret of the Lord is with them 
that fear him.' The secret of the Lord is the secret of 
the open eye, and what the open eye sees is that God is 
good. I had a noble time with it, and I think you would 
have enjoyed it." At how many such "noble times" has 
one assisted ! The fault with such preaching, as with all 
perfection, is that it spoils one's taste for anything less- 
excellent. Although the ideas that Dr. Clarke was then 
presenting to us were novel, and, to minds so plastic as 
ours, might easily have proved disturbing, there was 
never in his manner a hint of the self-conscious or the 
polemical; and I shall not soon forget the dismay and 
repugnance with which, some years later, I listened to 
another famous liberal preacher, who could not conceal 
his amazement at his own temerity. 

Little by little, week by week. Dr. Clarke laid before 
us his whole thought, quite honestly and directly, but 
so quietly and simply and reasonably that there was no 
place for surprise or alarm ; only a steadily growing 
sense of light, of freedom, of well-being. Never was 
preaching more perfectly expressive of the preacher. 
The singleness of aim, the refusal to be distracted by non- 
essentials, the unswerving quest of reality, the boundless 
comprehension, the unfailing sympathy, the invincible 
peace, which were the notes of every sermon, were the 
qualities of the man. Even the brief, pregnant sentences 
that linger in one's memory after all the years have his 
stamp upon them. "Rehgion is the humble life of a 
filial soul with the good God." "God's thought of us is 
the steady thought of love and wisdom." 

The discourses of the present volume have the same 
accent. As one reads them, the old mood returns, the old 
thrill of aspiration towards goodness and towards God 
that wrought upon one's youth, and gave to life the most 

viii 



PREFACE 

potent direction it has ever known. This is no doubt 
true of all who ever really came under his influence, no 
matter how far, in later years, their opinions may have 
diverged from his. Having known him, one could never 
think in a quite illiberal or unreal fashion again. This 
is because of his breadth, his comprehension, the entire 
absence in him of the sectarian mind. The substance 
and method of his thought may be laid hold of by men 
of diverse religious opinions, and have been, to their great 
profit. He once inquired whimsically in a letter, "Am I 
an Episcopalian-maker?" Certainly many clergymen, 
and laymen too, of faiths very different from his own, 
have acknowledged their profound obligation to him. 
The explanation is that he habitually dwelt in a region 
of thought that underlies and, in a measure, unifies all 
credal distinctions. "We are always talking," he writes, 
in the address on Huxley and Phillips Brooks, "as if the 
great question of our time were some question of 
theology, but it is not; it is the question of religion." 
This is what takes him out of any "school of theology," 
however broad, and places him among those, of whatever 
creed, who have a genius for religion. This accounts 
for the curious and, in the circumstances, even amusing 
resemblance that the student of Newman's writings can- 
not fail to notice between many of Dr. Clarke's deepest 
convictions and those of the great Catholic liberal. Such 
a remark as that above quoted concerning religion and 
theology is wholly in Newman's manner. So is the char- 
acteristically brief sentence in the address on Immortal- 
ity : "I am too small for my belief." Newman once wrote 
in a letter: "The human mind in its present state is 
unequal to its own powers of apprehension : it embraces 
more than it can master" — which might almost have 
served as a text for the address on Mystery in Religion. 
But these addresses require no texts drawn from other 
writers. Like the sermons, they are in no sense deriva- 

ix 



PREFACE 

tive. Upon all his writing, as upon all his speech, is the 
stamp of an original mind. It is notable how little he 
quotes from anyone, even the greatest. Only occasionally 
is there an echo of his immense reading. This is involved 
in his absolute genuineness, his inability to say the unreal. 
He says nothing that he has not lived. Why then should 
he quote authority for it ? It is based on the only author- 
ity that is infallible, the authority of experience. This 
is the reason why one receives from all his writing so 
vivid an impression of his personality. How alive he 
seems ! How alive, in the deepest sense of the word life, 
he still is! One thinks of Whitman's boast, "Who 
touches this book touches a man." 

The style and tone of the addresses is the style and 
tone of the sermons, and of his talk as well. He had but 
one manner. "We come, old friends and new together, 
to sit down in this quiet place and learn the truth." So 
begins the address on Mystery in Religion, and so might 
have begun every sermon, every serious conversation. 
There was no emphasis, no dogmatism, no touch of con- 
troversy. To sit down in a quiet place, with old friends 
or new, and learn the truth together was his only method ; 
and little by little, under the spell of it, one felt oneself 
swept out of one's perplexity and narrowness and self- 
seeking, into the presence of the very laws of life. Nor 
was there, as I have said, any disturbing sense that one 
was entering strange and alien regions of thought. Old 
things became new, and immortal. "What we call com- 
monplaces in religion are such only in the world of talk," 
he says, in the address on the Young Minister's Outlook ; 
but they were not commonplaces in his talk. One found, 
to quote him again, that "some very ancient things are 
still true." 

I despair of conveying the living impression that I have 
of him. I had the happiness and honor of his friendship 
as well as his instruction, and the hours I have spent with 

X 



PREFACE 

him are as unforgettable as those in which I have heard 
him preach. I have said already that he was exactly like 
his sermons. His mind was the "large upper chamber" 
of the Pilgrim, "whose window opened towards the sun- 
rising ; the name of the chamber was Peace." There was 
the same sense of spaciousness, of complete and sympa- 
thetic understanding, in his talk that there was in his 
discourses. He dwelt at a height where all differences 
are reconciled. Never was there the slightest intrusion 
of his own point of view to hinder his comprehension of 
another's, however limited or even hostile that might be. 
Hostility, indeed, did not thrive in his presence ; it found 
no air to breathe. I am not implying that he offered no 
resistance to narrowness or rigidity ; but they dwindled 
to their true proportions in the presence of his serene 
humanity and his divine charity. I well remember how 
youthful extravagance of expression or thought was 
shamed into sobriety by the quiet humor, the tranquil 
good sense, the touch of reality — one cannot use the word 
too often in connection with him — ^that characterized his 
speech. It would be to misunderstand him completely 
not to make a large place for humor in one's conception 
of him. It was never obtrusive, but it was never far off, 
a sweetening and healing presence. His letters abound 
in it, as in all the other qualities that I have been trying 
to describe. The same serenity and simplicity and 
breadth, the same sense of eternal values, the same gift 
of pithy, pregnant utterance that made his sermons and 
conversation so remarkable and so characteristic pervade 
his letters. They have a permanent value, like all that 
he did and said, because they deal freshly, originally, sin- 
cerely, with abiding things. "Yours for a hundred years," 
are the closing words of a letter with which he bids me 
welcome to the new century, and certainly a hundred 
years are not too many to measure the work of his spirit 
in the world. He seemed incapable of growing old, 

xi 



PREFACE 

despite the physical infirmities of his later years. It 
will be remembered that the books with which he stirred 
the mind of his generation were not written until after 
he was fifty. On the thirty-first of December, 1911, he 
wrote: "I attained to seventy years the other day, but 
am surprised to find how little there is in it, after all that 
has been said. It is all the same as before, and I imagine 
I should feel much the same about it if it were a still 
higher number on the list. I have been teaching this 
autumn with all the old delight, and have had as joyfuUy 
as I ever had it the feeling that I was really imparting 
to my men what I had for them." 

At this season and in days like these, it is inevitable 
that our minds should be much occupied by the problem 
of immortality. Amid the perplexity that surrounds it 
for most of us, the testimony of such a spirit as his is 
in the highest degree consoling and reassuring. Such 
passages as the following from his letters will prove, even 
more clearly than the noble discourse on Immortality, 
how serene was his conviction. No conviction less 
assured than this would have been consistent with his 
thought of divine things ; no faith less august would be 
consistent with our thought of him. 

"I well understand the questioning as to whether the 
dear dead do live on and see the light of love, but I can- 
not get away from the old conviction that they do. I 
have to leave the manner of it all unknown, and so it must 
remain, but the old hope of life and love abides, and it 
abides because God abides." 

''Easter is a good day, into which more and more the 
exulting sentiment of immortal hope is gathering as the 
years go by. I have read in my own house this morning 
the sentences and collect which you will read a little later 
with the congregation in church. I believe in the spiritual 
victory of God in Christ; therefore I rejoice to stand 
today and make my confession in the fellowship of all in 

xii 



PREFACE 

whom he has inspired the strength of hope, joining with 
all my heart in the testimony of love and praise." 

Charles H. A. Wager. 
Oberlin College, 
Easter, 1918. 



xni 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

Immortality 1 

Mystery In Religion 23 

The Work of Christ for Our Salvation 48 

Huxley and Phillips Brooks 62 

Revealed Religion . 86 

The Young Minister's Outlook 108 



IMMORTALITY: A STUDY OF BELIEF* 

I have lately been conducting a class through some 
studies concerning Christian Belief. In dealing with the 
subject I had to tell them that belief is no single and 
unambiguous thing. Various matters and kinds of mat- 
ters offer themselves to be dealt with under that single 
name, and the nature or process of belief is far from 
being the same with reference to them all. This variety 
in the sense of so practical and important a word may 
easily be a perplexing thing, and as a matter of fact the 
ambiguity has wrought much confusion in Christian 
thought. In the course of my work it occurred to me to 
make a sample study of belief, by which I might illustrate 
some of the different modes of believing, and some of the 
differences between different kinds of belief, with refer- 
ence to the quality and value of the result. At the same 
time I might throw some helpful light upon the doctrine, 
or the great reality, which I used for illustration. When 
I was invited to address this club, it seemed to me that 
I could not do better than to treat you as theologues, and 
reproduce, in better form if possible, this endeavor 
toward clearness in theologues' thinking. 

For the subject of this sample study of belief (not a 
model study, but only a study), take the very familiar 
question, 

Do you believe in immortality? 

Yes. The first impulse may be to answer Yes, off- 
hand, without special reflection on the sense in which the 

* Read in Marquand Chapel, Yale Divinity School, Novem- 
ber 29, 1911, before the George B. Stevens Theological Club, and 
published in the Yale Divinity Quarterly, January, 1912. 

I 



IMMORTALITY: A STUDY OF BELIEF 

question is asked, or the field which it is intended to cover. 
But it is needless to say that such an offhand answer 
is really no answer at all. The question is not ready to 
be considered until it has been more closely defined, and 
relieved of something of its ambiguity. So before going 
further we must ask what we m^ean by it. Immortality 
for whom ? 

Immortality of all human beings, of course, you may 
reply. Very likely in your own mind you may take it for 
granted that you believe this : you inwardly acknowledge 
your acceptance of belief in immortality for all that is 
human. You may not be aware of any serious difficulty 
in believing this: to you it may seem most natural. In 
some lights it is easy to believe, easier than any modifica- 
tion of the great idea. But not in all lights. Not all per- 
sons find it easy to believe : some find it impossible. For 
various reasons modifications of the instinctive answer 
would be welcomed. Perhaps on reflection one who gave 
the instinctive answer would find some other belief more 
manageable and satisfactory. Perhaps, indeed, you are 
already believing in immortality in some other sense, and 
mean something else by your Yes. If you do not mean 
the immortality of all human beings, perhaps you mean 
that you believe in the immortality of the higher section 
of the race, the persons who make a reasonable success of 
life in this mortal world. You may feel that future Hfe 
awaits those who develop personality enough to attain to 
it, those who become sufficiently organized and vigorous 
to lay hold upon a higher range of being. You may feel 
compelled to limit the candidates for immortality to those 
who are thoroughly successful here, saying with Matthew 
Arnold : 

And he who flagg'd not in the earthly strife, 
From strength to strength advancing — only he, 
His soul well-knit, and all his battles won, 
Mounts, and that hardly, to eternal Hfe. 

2 



IMMORTALITY: A STUDY OF BELIEF 

These chief of men will rise to victorious advance, you 
may think, while the most of men, not having attained, 
sink back to nothingness. If you are viewing the matter 
as some Christians do, you may give the thought the form 
of conditional immortality, as it is called, or continued 
existence only for those who are saved by divine grace 
in Christ. Immortality, you may think, is not assured to 
all men by any gift of nature, but is included in the gift 
which is known as eternal life, conferred by God only 
through faith in Christ. Through the Christian experi- 
ence men rise to immortality; but those who are not in 
Christ, having come to the end of their natural endow- 
ment and received nothing more, will simply cease to be. 
Thus you may be able to say, "I believe in immortality," 
and be quite sure that you do so believe, while yet your 
affirmation is ambiguous and your belief ill-defined. And 
on further thought, when the various views are set before 
you, you may not find it so very easy to tell just where 
you stand, and whom you are ready to call immortal. 
You may feel the force of conflicting reasons, and for 
the time stand somewhat uncertain. But now, having 
taken note of this ambiguit}'-, we will assume, for the pur- 
pose of the present hour, that you take the most familiar 
ground, and that when you say Yes you mean that you 
believe all men to be immortal. All are to live on beyond 
death. 

Perhaps it will be helpful if I turn aside for a moment 
to say that I think you are right if you do mean this. I 
see no sufficient reason for believing in conditional im- 
mortality, or immortality conditioned upon faith in 
Christ. This belief wins some Christians, because it de- 
livers them from their old belief in everlasting sin and 
punishment. I had a kinsman who welcomed it with joy 
on this ground. But it does not appeal to me as accordant 
with what I know of God, or of man. Before I could 
believe it the light of God's own revelation would have to 

3 



IMMORTALITY: A STUDY OF BELIEF 

illuminate it for me: the gospel itself would have to be 
arrayed on its side — which, so far as I can see, it is not. 
Nothing in the Christian conception of God gives it any 
help, or tends to render it credible. So I cannot take it in. 
As for Matthew Arnold's answer, immortality for those 
who rise to it by high attainment of personality and vic- 
tory in this life, I can strongly feel the force of the con- 
siderations that are cited in favor of it. There is much 
to be said for it as an interpretation of the facts of life, 
and I do not wonder that it appeals to many. I am only 
too well aware of the almost insurmountable difficulties 
that beset the thought of immortality for all men. The 
thought is so vast as to be absolutely overwhelming, and 
it necessarily awakens questions far beyond my power to 
answer. Not because universal immortality is easy to be- 
lieve in do I believe in it, for in some respects some form 
of limited immortality could be believed in far more 
easily. Yet on the whole I find that my heart and mind 
can rest in no limited conception. The very vastness that 
overwhelms me attracts and holds me, and in spite of all 
the difficulties I must affirm my belief in future life for 
all that is human. But I do not claim a full and faultless 
belief, nor do I expect you quickly to attain to one, I 
know that in proportion to the vastness of the fact, my 
faith in it is lacking in clear-cut distinctness. In propor- 
tion to the same vastness I know also that it lacks appro- 
priate power as a controlling conviction in my life. But 
for this I do not blame myself so much, after all. Proba- 
bly the defect is inevitable. I am too small for my belief. 
I shall have to rise to full belief in immortality through 
the growth of my soul in capacity for so vast a concep- 
tion. Well do I know how deficient my present belief in 
immortality is ; nevertheless it is a fact that I do believe 
in it in its broadest range, and not in any of the dimin- 
ished forms in which it is offered to me. 

This personal testimony may perhaps be helpful as we 

4 



IMMORTALITY: A STUDY OF BELIEF 

proceed, but now we will return from the digression. To 
our question, Do you believe in immortality ? we will take 
the affirmative answer in the largest sense, meaning that 
you believe in immortality as a destiny that belongs to all 
human beings. But this only prepares the way for an- 
other question, which is. 

How do you believe in it? 

for there are various ways of approaching and holding 
this belief in immortality. At present I am studying it as 
a belief. So let me continue my catechism, and inquire 
how the belief came to you. I wish to consider from 
what quarter it has been urged upon you ; and in connec- 
tion with that inquiry I wish you to notice what various 
degrees of appeal, of force, and of value, it may have, 
according as it comes to you from this quarter or from 
that. 

The first question must be, Do you take your belief in 
immortality as a belief that has come to you out of the 
past? Is it to you in some manner an inherited article 
of faith? Did it come to you without your seeking it 
or knowing where it came from ? 

This may well be so, without there being in it the least 
reproach to you or discredit to your belief. It is nothing 
to be ashamed of. First of all, we have been brought up 
in a Christian atmosphere that was saturated with the 
thought of immortality. How well I remember how the 
voice of Jesus and of his church through all the ages 
of Christian faith rang out upon the summer air one 
Sunday afternoon! I stood there beside an open grave, 
a boy holding my father's hand, awed by the solemn 
majesty of death, not knowing what was coming next, 
when suddenly the perfect silence was broken by the 
words, "I am the resurrection and the life: if any man 
believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live, 
and he that liveth and believeth in me shall never die." 

5 



IMMORTALITY: A STUDY OF BELIEF 

How it thrilled me! A sense of the reality of the life 
beyond was driven deep home into my mind by that great 
utterance of truth and faith. So Christian faith has put 
its cumulative force upon many of us, nay, upon all of 
us more or less. We are bom heirs to a certain degree 
of Christian faith in immortality whether we know it or 
not. And we are not to be blamed for being influenced 
by this inheritance, and the belief is not less worthy for 
being brought to us thus through influence, without its 
accompanying reasons. 

But this is not the whole matter. Much more is true. 
The belief in immortality is borne in upon us in this 
manner from a field much vaster than the Christian past. 
Christianity is but of yesterday. In some form or other, 
and with more or less response of life to a great reality, 
the human race generally has believed in the future life, 
or the life unseen. Men have felt sure that there was a 
reality beyond all that was visible, and believed that the 
departed had entered upon that unseen existence : into it 
they have expected, too, that they themselves would soon 
be received. Very childish sometimes the thought has 
been, and sometimes more worthy of grown-up minds, 
but rarely if ever has it been absent from human experi- 
ence. This has gone on for uncounted ages, and at 
present the sense of an unseen life comes to us as an heir- 
loom, as it were, of humanity. It is delivered to us as 
nothing less than a racial tradition: it has been handed 
down in the substance of common feeling and thought 
from immemorial times, far beyond our farthest stretch 
of knowledge. It reaches us now as a normal assump- 
tion, on the ground of the common experience and con- 
viction of mankind, and we seem born to take it for 
granted that death has no power to stop the continuity of 
life. 

Perhaps you may find yourself believing in immortality 
in some such way as this. Your belief is a living thing, 

6 



IMMORTALITY: A STUDY OF BELIEF 

a part of yourself, and yet it may not rest upon any 
authority that you can quote, or be due to any definite 
reasons that you can give. You may be holding it because 
the belief, so to speak, runs in the human blood. Or you 
may prefer to say that the idea pervades the atmosphere 
of human life, so that when you breathe with natural 
breath you breathe it in. Or, dropping such imagery, you 
may point to the part of your own being in which the 
belief seems to have been nourished. It sprang up within 
your mysterious self. The immeasurable past has sent 
down its bequest to you, or rather its living gift, and it 
has flowed into your subconscious life. It is present now 
in that region which you never explore : you cannot ex- 
plore it, but you know it as a region where vital thought 
and feeling have their intimate sources. That region of 
our being is full of ancestral bequests, which have become 
living inheritances in us, although we have not the power 
to identify them in themselves. In their fruits we know 
them. Among these inheritances from the immemorial 
past is the sense of immortality. 

When I have said this, I have placed the belief in im- 
mortality in a place of high honor, and also of enormous 
power. We do not have to apologize to anyone else, or 
to our own souls, for entertaining it. Such a belief is no 
merely personal or individualistic thing, gotten up for 
one's own use or comfort. To us of this late day it is 
not far from being a part of our human endowment ; not 
an inseparable part, perhaps, but yet an element closely 
attached to our very life. We do not have to adopt it, it 
adopts us. It is by a process quite legitimate that it be- 
comes a part of our very selves. Evidently a belief thus 
grounded should have immense power to influence life. 
Its influence is the greater because it is put forth not 
through any indirect process, such as reasoning, but 
rather through feeling, which strikes into life and soul 
directly. As a matter of fact, the belief is sensitive to 

7 



IMMORTALITY: A STUDY OF BELIEF 

reasoning, and may easily be rendered less at home in the 
soul by arguments for it, as well as by arguments against 
it. It likes to be an instinctive thing, and sometimes 
shrinks beneath the light of inquiry. But it is plain to be 
seen that the age-long sense of a future beyond death 
must be an immensely powerful thing. The conditions 
of its being make it one of the most impressive and influ- 
ential forces in the world. There is not any behef in 
immortality anywhere that has not in this ancestral sense 
a powerful reinforcement : or perhaps it would be truer 
to say that in this immemorial conviction all our more 
special beliefs in immortality are rooted, and that out of 
its soil they would scarcely flourish. 

Of course it is not meant that this ancient conviction 
always maintains the belief in its worthiest forms. Much 
influence of a childish character came down from long 
ago. We inherit effect from views undefined, and visions 
neither clear nor lofty. These inherited influences must 
come under judgment when the time comes, and some 
of them will be judged unworthy to hold their place, and 
will give way to better forces. So far as the transmitted 
sense of immortality brings us impulses unworthy of our 
manhood, they must be corrected. But the large and 
general belief is a good gift of God. Before we are 
through we shall see how well it fits into the worthy 
scheme of life that we have learned from Jesus to appre- 
hend. If you cherish a sense of another life as a contribu- 
tion from humanity, you do well. 

We come to another manner of believing in immor- 
tality, modern in its form, and yet having much in com- 
mon with more primitive conceptions. Continuing my 
catechism, I ask, Do you believe in immortality as some- 
thing that has been proved, or partly proved, or at least 
commended to you, by evidence of the senses? Do you 
think the other world has come over into this to vindicate 
its own existence? 

8 



IMMORTALITY: A STUDY OF BELIEF 

Many years ago I was strolling through a New England 
town while waiting for a train, and passed the door of a 
hall where a workingmen's Lyceum held its meetings ; 
and there I read the question that was to be debated when 
next they met : "Resolved, that the phenomena of modern 
spiritualism demonstrate the immortality of the soul." 
Evidently there were some in that town who thought that 
spiritualism had closed the case, by bringing the departed 
into immediate communication with the living. At one 
time there were many who thought the proof was perfect. 
I suppose there are not so many now, but there are some. 
Others, though not convinced of so much as that, still are 
impressed, and feel that something toward proof has been 
accomplished ; while still others are haunted by the feeling 
that the evidence is perhaps sufficient and ought to con- 
vince them. And indeed if the evidence is good at all it 
is very good, so far as it goes. If the thing has been 
done, the point is proved. One genuine communication 
positively established would make it certain that one 
human being had survived death, and would create a 
presumption that others had done the same. Our beloved 
comrade George A. Grt)rdon has said, in substance, that 
the reported communications, if they were genuine, would 
indicate that there is hope for all, since they would show 
that some of the very weakest had gotten safely across. 
There have been recent claims, much more respectable 
than the average claims of spiritualism. One cannot read 
the recent reports of Mr. Stead in London without feel- 
ing that his story is probably the best that has yet been 
told. The question is a question of fact, and some are 
satisfied with the evidence. Perhaps you may believe 
in the other life on some such grounds ; or at least your 
conviction of it may have been reinforced by such experi- 
ences or reports. 

Or, apart from the ordinary spiritualism, you may be 
influenced by the modern work that goes by the name of 

9 



IMMORTALITY: A STUDY OF BELIEF 

Psychical Research. Men of scientific mind have under- 
taken to put this question of fact thoroughly to the test. 
With all candor and faithfulness they have tried to find 
out whether the departed have really spoken back out of 
another world into this. They have sought most carefully 
to shut out all fraud and deception, which have crept in 
so often under the name of spiritualism. They have been 
equally anxious to eliminate all sources of error, so far 
as that could be done ; and the modern psychology shows 
the possibilities of mistake in this field to be far greater 
than used to be suspected. They have tried so to work 
that what they really learned they could be wholly sure 
of. Under these rigidly guarded conditions they have 
sought communications from the unseen world. The 
result is that some of them think that they have convinc- 
ing evidence of actual communication with certain 
selected spirits, proving that they live on, preserve their 
characteristics, and retain knowledge of certain matters 
that were known to them in this life. Some think thus, 
but others of them are not so ready to claim that the case 
is perfectly clear. 

Of such endeavors we must say that they are perfectly 
legitimate. Spiritualism is a perfectly proper thing, if 
only it is true. In fact, I am not sure that spiritualism 
does not deserve rather better than it has received from 
Christian people ; for, notwithstanding all the crimes and 
crudities that have been associated with it, it has done 
something toward keeping alive in a materialistic time at 
least a dim sense of life beyond. And as for the Society 
of Psychical Research, its endeavors are certainly legiti- 
mate. It is quite credible that it may prove the reality of 
the other life, and we must receive the evidence if it is 
really obtained. If it brings the other world nearer to 
our belief, and gives us new light as to what is going on 
there, we shall have reason to be thankful. We need 

10 



IMMORTALITY: A STUDY OF BELIEF 

have, and should have, no prejudice whatever against this 
mode of seeking evidence of immortality. 

But what shall we think of the quality, the value, the 
power, of evidence of another life obtained in such a 
way ? What nature and efficiency will belong to a belief 
in immortality thus certified to the senses, and to the mind 
through the senses? I am sure we must say that the 
belief in another life to which such evidence gave rise 
might naturally be a very clear and positive one. It would 
rank with other beliefs that are substantiated by tangible 
evidence. It would resemble our beliefs about the most 
earthly matters. It would have similar standing with my 
present belief in the reality of the city of Peking, which 
I have never seen, but to which a friend of mine has gone, 
from whom I receive an occasional letter. In such proof 
there is nothing spiritual. I would not call it material- 
istic, but it is external, ministered through the senses, and 
weighed only in the scales of the intellect. Such a belief 
would not be among those that are born of the soul : it 
would not have sprung up in response to the soul's own 
nature or needs or aspirations. Some beliefs grow up 
out of an inward necessity, but this would be nothing 
more than an external product. Plainly to a belief thus 
originated the strongest constraining power cannot be- 
long. It may be clear-cut and definite, and it may be 
convincing in a high degree; but we cannot feel that it 
could be in an equal degree inspiring. It may indeed 
become associated with the world of internal feeling: it 
may even become associated with religious feeling, 
although it has grown up apart from religion and has 
essentially nothing in common with it. Through associa- 
tion with the vital powers of the soul such a belief may 
obtain a certain amount of vital influence. But it is irfi- 
possible to think of a belief in immortality grounded in 
spiritualism or in Psychical Research as occupying a place 
among the primary vital forces that sway the soul and 

II 



IMMORTALITY: A STUDY OF BELIEF 

dominate the life. Beliefs that are to do such work 
may be confirmed from without, but need to have sprung 
up within. 

Another manner of believing in immortality may have 
appealed to you. I remember hearing a solemn academy 
student declaim a poetical extract, I think from Addison. 
It was the poet's meditation on immortality, which he 
apparently accepted after doubts, and it began, 

Plato, it must be so : thou reasonest well. 

Do you believe in immortality as something that has 
been thought out, or reasoned through ? Is the belief in 
your mind the result of argument, formal or informal, 
so that you think of it as something proved? Are its 
roots in philosophy, or in metaphysics, or in some en- 
deavor after demonstrative operation? Perhaps you 
yourself have argued for it, constrained it may be by 
doubt, or by wonder, or by the vital sense of need : or 
perhaps you have been influenced by the reasonings of 
others. Perhaps in bereavement you have studied argu- 
ments, for the reinforcement of your confidence. 

We are all influenced more or less by reasonings in this 
field. It is very true that arguments have often been 
framed that amount to nothing. It used to be argued, 
as I remember, that the soul could not be put out of 
existence because it was immaterial, and the immaterial 
is indestructible. But that was only exploiting our own 
ignorance and calling it argument. It is also true that no 
argument can suflice to demonstrate immortality. A gen- 
uine demonstration is such a procedure that after it no 
sane mind can fail to accept the conclusion. The long 
and anxious experience of mankind in looking toward 
another life is enough to show that no such argument has 
ever been available for human use. The confidence that 
men have had in another life has not come from such a 
source. And when we consider the field in which the 

12 



IMMORTALITY: A STUDY OF BELIEF 

question moves, we feel at once that it is not a region in 
which demonstration can possibly be eifective. There is 
no way to construct a demonstrative argument that shall 
sustain so vast a conclusion. Apart from all considera- 
tions of the spiritual range of the thought, the mere ex- 
tent of the idea of immortality puts it beyond the reach 
of the demonstrative method. We must get our certainty, 
if we are to have it, in some other way. Nevertheless we 
are all much influenced by what may properly be called 
reasonings on the subject. We are, and we well may be. 
There is much reasoning that is irrepressible, and much 
that is helpful. The case resembles that of the existence 
of God. That greatest of realities cannot be demon- 
strated, and yet there are many reasonings that lead us 
toward it and help us in rising to it. 

Some reasonings on immortality would seem to the 
common man to belong to the schools ; that is, they imply 
the conscious use of philosophical considerations and 
methods. But they may be less special than they appear, 
and more like the common man's mental operations. 
Works of the schools do not necessarily form a class by 
themselves. As it seems to me, the chief testimony of 
philosophy toward immortality is borne in the work that 
philosophy does in greatening the conception of man. 
Philosophy does greaten the living humanity. Directly 
and indirectly, it exhibits the greatness, the dignity, the 
majesty, of human powers. It well knows how far man 
is from perfection in his own kind, and how far from 
the ideal of his being ; yet it does set him forth in a magni- 
tude that powerfully commends him as a candidate for a 
more adequate life than this. It sets before us a human- 
ity that transcends all present conditions of its being, 
and thus helps us to expect for it a wider scope and a 
longer range of opportunity. Of the question of immor- 
tality philosophy has long been mindful, as indeed it was 

13 



IMMORTALITY: A STUDY OF BELIEF 

bound to be; and while it has no minute predictions to 
offer, it ranks high among the prophets. 

But, as I have intimated, its forecast is not so unHke 
that of the common mind as the common mind may im- 
agine. The informal reasonings that influence us most in 
favor of immortality are flashes of confidence that rise 
up out of our sense of the greatness of humanity. Per- 
haps you will think I ought not to call them reasonings : 
quite as much they are irrepressible suggestions of life 
reaching out to demand its native right. These of course 
are the property of the common man, quite as much as of 
any specialist. They belong to life. What! this mere 
span of time the whole? this short day enough for a being 
like man? this life of limited opportunity adequate to 
his native needs? the satisfaction that he finds here all 
that is meant for him? this imperfect state the final state? 
Is the highest product of time destined only to extinc- 
tion ? These and a multitude of questions burst out from 
the common heart, and they are not only questions, they 
are arguments. They plead for more as the proper con- 
clusion for that which now is. They do not clamor for 
particular forms of the future, or specify precisely what 
must be had, but they do rise to demand more than this 
life gives as the rational right of such a creature as man 
has proved himself to be. There is no reasonable defense, 
they claim, for such a creature stopping short and being 
no more forever. They are calls of the heart, but reason 
joins in them, and they ask for mankind the reasonable 
privilege of going on, and fulfilling itself in a larger life. 
As formal arguments, these appeals are not so very 
formidable to our fears. Their strength lies rather in 
their informality, their naturalness, their indifference to 
regularity. They are the risings of conscious humanity 
to claim an adequate portion. Here it is interesting to 
note how they are related to that primitive sense of im- 
mortality of which we spoke at first. The claim for im- 

14 



IMMORTALITY: A STUDY OF BELIEF 

mortality of which we are speaking now is that primeval 
sense of immortality rationalized, explained, accounted 
for to the mind of humanity itself. Of old there was a 
vague and instinctive sense of another life: but now 
humanity, becoming aware of what it is, cries out in a 
thousand voices, "This is what I was made for, and I 
cannot do with less/' This is the vital point of the 
reasoning that confirms our hope. 

It is worth while to notice how the argument from the 
greatness of man has been confirmed in our time from 
an unexpected quarter. Not long ago it was feared that 
the modern evolutionary idea would degrade man by 
tracing him back to lower origins, and would so cut off 
all higher connections as to leave his immortality a wild 
dream. But the case is turned about. The ruling idea in 
the modern thought is not the tracing of man down to 
lower life. On the contrary, it is the tracing of lower 
life up to man. The result is a greatening of the human. 
At the summit of a terrestrial process so long that imagi- 
nation gives it up, and so complicated and full of risks 
that it is marvelous that any rational result emerged 
without wreck, stands human personality. It is a splen- 
did crown for the amazing process. From life personality 
has been unfolded. To the very beginnings of life the 
unfolding of it can be traced back, and of the age-long 
development of life it is the fruit. Before we knew its 
antecedents we knew that personality was great enough 
to have immortality for its normal outlook. Now that 
we understand it better, the length, the elaborateness, the 
difficulty, of the gestation from which human personality 
has been born brings fresh enhancement to the greatness 
of humanity. Surely we may predicate permanence of a 
product thus obtained. Is a personality obtained through 
this marvelous and painful process of evolution to be a 
thing of an hour's duration, with no prospects or uses 
beyond this moment of time? Is it to have no develop- 

15 



IMMORTALITY: A STUDY OF BELIEF 

ment beyond the infancy which it here attains ? Who can 
believe it? The evolutionary view of life adds its voice 
to the many voices that are lifted up to claim for man 
the reasonable right of immortality. 

If you believe in immortality in this manner, you are 
coming on. If your own nature is a premise to which 
immortality is the conclusion, you have something that 
goes far toward the heart of the matter. The reasoning 
is informal, but it is grounded in the nature of things. 

The next question leads us into another region. It is, 
Do you believe in immortality as a fact attested by the 
Bible? Do you hold it on the strength of biblical testi- 
mony and authority? 

Christians very generally have held the great belief on 
this ground. At least they have understood themselves to 
be doing so. As a matter of fact they have held it partly 
on the authority of the Bible, and partly for the large 
reasons that have led men in general to hold it. But 
Christians have recognized the biblical basis of their be- 
lief more clearly than the other bases. Besides, the 
appeal of the biblical considerations has been felt more 
warmly than the appeal of ancient inheritance or the 
manifest destiny of human nature. In this way it has 
come to pass that most Christians have built their every- 
day hope very largely on the Bible. 

You may have felt the decisive influence of the Bible 
in any of various ways. Perhaps you are convinced that 
the Bible teaches immortality in plain and unmistakable 
terms, so that you have only to read and accept its testi- 
mony. Christians have acted upon this conviction, citing 
texts from the Bible to support their faith. Often, as we 
know, they have quoted the Bible indiscriminately, using 
its utterances as of equal authority throughout. In this 
way they have often built an earnest hope on texts that 
did not properly support it ; while at the same time they 
were using other statements of the highest worth. You 

i6 



IMMORTALITY: A STUDY OF BELIEF 

may have passed on from such undiscriminating use of 
the Bible, and may be depending upon utterances of 
Christ himself and spiritual unfoldings of his spiritual 
thought, affording warm Christian testimony to the im- 
mortal hope. You may feel that in its constant teaching 
the Bible implies the other life so thoroughly as to 
teach it just as decisively as if its terms were much more 
definite than they are. Your eyes may glow as you look 
upon the hopes to which the Bible points you, and you 
may shudder at the fears to which it calls the attention 
of men. Contemplating thus its outlook upon destiny, 
you may feel that the hopes, the fears and the general 
outlook all sweep the field of immortality just as truly as 
the field of the present life. You may be sure that they 
could not possibly be what they are if they did not assume 
the future existence of all souls. Thus you may feel that 
your belief in immortality is justified by the large revela- 
tion which God has made in Jesus Christ and preserved 
in the Bible. 

Among the forms of the belief that we have mentioned, 
this is the first one that we can distinctly call religious. 
Not because it is grounded in the Bible. The source of 
a belief does not determine how religious it is to be. In 
the primitive sense of immortality there is doubtless 
something religious, and there may be much. Religion 
may enter into any of the beliefs that we have mentioned : 
certainly it should enter into the belief that springs from 
our sense of the greatness of man and his kinship with 
immortal destinies. But on the other hand a belief that 
is founded on authoritative statements is not necessarily 
a religious belief. Authority that can be cited in words 
and brought to bear through quotations is essentially ex- 
ternal to the soul. Being founded in the Bible does not 
render a belief vital to him who holds it. If God should 
write his testimony to your immortality here upon the 
wall before you, and you knew that the handwriting was 

17 



IMMORTALITY: A STUDY OF BELIEF 

his and the testimony came straight from him, still it 
would be quite possible for you to go your way to your 
merchandise or to your sin, knowing that you had read 
God's record but bearing no conviction of immortality 
in your soul. A belief must be vitalized by living divine 
connections before it can be a living religious belief. God 
must be in the belief itself. 

But the belief in immortality that Christians have 
drawn from the Bible has been a religious belief ; and the 
reason is that the deference for the Bible has been a 
deference for God. The Bible has never been an inde- 
pendent authority. Only because its testimony was ac- 
cepted as the testimony of God has it been accounted 
authoritative. The faith that was founded in the Bible 
became a religious faith because the Bible represented — 
not was — the supreme authority. It was the sense of 
God in the book that made the texts sacred and rendered 
their testimony precious. Once every word in the book 
was taken to be his direct utterance, and then the seem- 
ingly solid foundation of authority was broad. By and 
by, when the human element in the Bible was discerned, 
the field was narrowed, and altered, too. From uncer- 
tain foundations, the belief in immortality was driven 
home to its congenial place, the utterance and spirit of 
Jesus, revealing God and man. Through all these stages 
of its history the confidence in immortality that rested 
on the Bible has always been animated by the spirit and 
power of religion, and has stood as a profoundly reli- 
gious belief. Whether the testimony has been found to 
be formal or informal, specific or general, "Thus saith 
the Lord" has been the justifying word. "Thus saith the 
Lord, there is life beyond." 

To say this is to utter a commonplace, so well known is 
it that the bibHcal belief in immortality has been gifted 
with the power of religion. It is in the sight of God, 
and through trust in God, that the confidence has been 

i8 



IMMORTALITY: A STUDY OF BELIEF 

held. And it is another commonplace that the biblical 
belief in immortality has been an immensely powerful 
thing for inspiration and uplift to actual life. It has been 
an undying hope, full of the brightness of a glorious ex- 
pectation, "So shall we be ever with the Lord." From it, 
therefore, in all Christian ages, have proceeded strength 
and consolation of unspeakable worth. From the same 
belief has proceeded warning also, exceedingly solemn; 
for evil men as well as good have been made to feel that 
the significance of their character took hold on endless 
destiny. Like all human beliefs, this one has had its 
imperfections, sometimes very serious; but its power 
upon life is too plain to be doubted, and its great benefi- 
cence lies too near the heart to be forgotten. 

All this is as we should expect. What should have 
power upon life if not a great expectation, grounded in 
testimony of God? Its quality is heavenly, however 
injured by human imperfection, and its efficiency is 
divine. 

This might seem to be the end of the matter, but it is 
not. I must speak of one more way of believing in im- 
mortality. This mode is not altogether distinct from the 
others, but may be reached through them, or illustrated 
in any of them. Really, it is the life of the others, so far 
as they are truly living things. Nevertheless this way of 
believing stands by itself, and deserves by itself to be 
considered. The question that opens it is. Do you believe 
in the immortal life as a spiritual reality ? 

This may seem a vague and indefinite designation, but 
I hope we may find it clear enough. If we have ever 
thought of immortality with deep seriousness, we already 
know in general what it means. The present question 
is not, Where does your belief in immortality come from ? 
or. How do you defend it ? but. Of what sort is it ? How 
does immortality appeal to you, and what does it mean to 
you ? How does it take hold of you ? What is it to your 

19 



IMMORTALITY: A STUDY OF BELIEF 

soul? This is the question that goes deepest, so far as 
personal belief is concerned. Immortality may offer itself 
to you as something that must be true if all highest 
things are true. Better than that, you may feel that 
immortality must be true since all highest things are true. 
The second of all great realities it may be to you, God the 
first and immortality the next — and it may appeal to you 
and be real to you in something like due proportion to 
this its high position. 

It is impossible to tell in how many ways this concep- 
tion may be borne in upon you. But there are two great 
modes, of which one is negative and the other positive. 
You may feel that without immortality all is vain or 
disappointing; and on the other hand you may be im- 
pressed with the living sense of an immortality that 
crowns, completes and honors all. I cannot keep these 
two conceptions apart : they flow into each other. In one 
aspect you may believe in immortality as a spiritual 
reality that must be: in the other, as a spiritual reality 
that is, and is glorious. 

I have spoken of the cries which are instinctive reason- 
ings, whereby humanity claims its immortal portion. 
Here they spring up in power. Immortality may dawn 
upon you as the great necessity: it must be real if the 
present life is to be a life indeed — not only that its 
mysteries may be cleared up and its inequalities corrected, 
but because present life itself is too great to be its own 
all. You may seem to see all best significances and high- 
est hopes sinking into nothingness if this their true glory 
be withdrawn. You may be thinking of persons, perhaps 
unspeakably dear to you, whose extinction would seem to 
be as criminal as it is incredible. Or you may think of 
humanity in general, composed of persons in whom alone 
its unimaginable wealth of power and possibility can come 
to fulfillment ; and it may be borne in upon you, not as a 
logical conclusion but as a wave of sympathetic conviction 

20 



IMMORTALITY: A STUDY OF BELIEF 

and aspiration, that to this personal greatness immortaUty 
alone corresponds. You may feel that your human heart 
would mourn inconsolably over man as incomplete, if his 
range were limited to the life that now is : you may feel 
yourself struggling along with the struggle of the univer- 
sal spirit out toward larger scope. In such manner the 
fitness of the immortal life may overshadow you, and its 
reality as a spiritual necessity may so impress you that 
you become as sure of the future as you are of the 
present. 

Then you may think of God, of his greatness, his 
eternity, his love, his nearness of heart to man, as all 
this has been brought home to us in Jesus Christ; and 
with this thought of God in mind you may catch a glimpse 
of man whom you love, as akin to God in the spiritual 
nature that he bears. God you love, and man you bear 
upon your heart; and now, in your vision of God, you 
have found a solid foundation for your high hope of man. 
The everlasting world which man needs is not a dream : 
it exists, and it is not vacant. God is there. In the world 
to which man aspires, God exists eternal. In the region 
where man craves to live, his Father is, the Being upon 
whom his being even now reposes. When you thus dis- 
cern the God of all spirits in the world invisible, you see 
how normal it is for human spirits to rise thither and 
find the destiny that befits them. You have not reasoned 
it out, you are simply discerning the fruition of the 
human hope, in discerning God. Then you remember 
that God has shown himself to us in saving love, with 
the intent that man may be delivered out of all evil bond- 
age into the glorious liberty of the sons of God. Upon 
this you perceive with joy that the whole great scheme 
of existence corresponds together. Man aspiring to im- 
mortality is aspiring into the bosom of his Father, and 
his Father is there to receive him. God taking hold upon 
man to bring him to his true self and service is undertak- 

21 



IMMORTALITY: A STUDY OF BELIEF 

ing a task unlimited. But for the task he has unHmited 
room and opportunity, for man is a being whose range 
runs on through all the duration that God can need. 
Contemplating man thus not in himself alone but in his 
relation to his God, you may soar at once above the 
thought of him as mortal. That thought may quite 
vanish in the vision of a life adequate to his best self and 
possibilities, and sufficient for the creative purpose of his 
God. In immortality God will bring man to the end for 
which he first designed him and will use him for all the 
high purposes to which his nature is adapted. 

There are more ways to believe than one. This glimpse 
of high belief in immortality lets us into one of the high- 
est modes of believing. Perhaps there is no other belief 
so lofty in its nature as this except the highest belief in 
God, which imparts its own greatness to other spiritual 
beliefs. Of course w^e cannot believe everything in such 
a manner: lower modes for lower matters, and lower 
modes, as we have seen, are sometimes useful in high 
matters. We have seen belief in immortality brought 
to pass through ancestral influence, through testimony to 
the senses, through reasonings, through deference to 
authority, through spiritual insight and conviction. May 
the day come when the highest evidence shall have the 
greatest weight with the sons of men, made for immor- 
tality. 



22 



MYSTERY IN RELIGION 

The Annual Opening Address before Hamilton 
Theological Seminary, September 15, 1896 

Our Seminary once more opens its doors to welcome 
us, and we come, old friends and new together, to sit 
down in this quiet place and learn the truth. This is our 
purpose here, this and nothing lower: to learn together 
as we may the living and powerful truth of God. The 
end of our presence here is not the studying of books, 
the learning of languages, the acquiring of methods, the 
mastering of systems. All these are means rather than 
ends, steps that may be important but are not final. We 
are here to learn the truth of God concerning religion, 
and the best way of using it for the practical ends of the 
gospel. Let us set this high aim distinctly before us at 
the beginning, and take the oath of allegiance to it here 
tonight. No lower aim is worthy of us, and none should 
any man of us for a moment entertain. Humbly, fear- 
lessly, and hopefully, we must set ourselves to learn the 
truth of God and the way to use it. May God keep us 
loyal to this high endeavor. 

The field of our study we call the field of Theology — 
for are we not, teachers and students together, a theo- 
logical seminary? Yet this name does not tell the exact 
truth about our calling. Our field is the field of religion. 
Theology is a study, but religion is an experience. The- 
ology is a science, but religion is a life. Theology is the 
study of reHgion, and when we study theology we are 
studying religion. I cannot stay to prove or illustrate this 

23 



IMMORTALITY: A STUDY OF BELIEF 

at present, but I offer it as a fact that gives great light 
upon the character of our work. Students of reUgion 
are we — students not of a system merely but of an ex- 
perience; not of a science but of a life. We are students 
of the life of man in fellowship with God. How glori- 
ously does this conception of our theme broaden our 
field and enrich the subject of our study ! No limits con- 
fine us here. All that pertains to the life of man in fel- 
lowship with God lies within our field, and all the charm 
and richness of experience come in to fascinate us as we 
bend over our work. No study is so full of vitality and 
power as this study of religion itself, the noblest, pro- 
foundest and most enduring element in the life of man: 
and to this study we are now to give ourselves. Within 
these walls we study the living God and the living human- 
ity; we study God's revelation and man's experience; 
God's providence and man's religious history; God's 
salvation and man's destiny; God's call of grace and the 
most useful ways of serving God and man in holy min- 
istry. These are living themes of religion itself ; and we 
must all think of ourselves here as students not merely of 
theolog>% but of religion. 

In preparation for our work, I shall speak tonight of 
one element in religion of which all men have had experi- 
ence, and with which we shall constantly have to do — 
I mean the element of Mystery in Religion. It is an 
ever present element, now darkening and now glorious, 
now perplexing and now full of inspiration. We cannot 
be students without meeting it, and upon the manner in 
which we learn to deal with it will depend much of our 
success. Let us think of it tonight. 

Need I attempt to define Mystery ? It is better to illus- 
trate it. We all know how we come upon it, and with 
what sensations we meet it. When we begin to study, 
it is easy to assume that we are to find what we seek — 
and we seek clear knowledge. If we are successful, we 

24 



MYSTERY IN RELIGION 

shall obtain definite results that we can put into clear 
statements. This seems a reasonable expectation, and 
one without which we might scarcely be willing to study 
— for what other result would duly reward our labor? 
Begin, then, with this expectation. Investigate your 
facts, in any field of study. You accomplish what you 
hoped. Certainty does not elude you. Clear statements 
you obtain. Suppose that you are working in the science 
of Physics, and reach the clear and certain law that 
bodies attract one another in proportion to their mass, 
and inversely according to the square of their distance. 
What can be clearer than that? or more mysterious? 
Bodies? What are bodies, that they should attract one 
another? What is the attractive power? whence came 
it, and where does it reside? You have described the 
mode of operation of some power that lies far beyond 
your searching. When will you be ready to report in 
plain terms upon this something that you have described 
in its working but not defined? Your solid statement 
rests upon a foundation of mystery, of which, search as 
you may, you can find neither bottom nor end. 

This is a good illustration of mystery, and it may serve 
us better than a definition. What we have thus found 
in one place, we find everywhere. We speak of the mys- 
tery of life, in tree or plant, in insect or in man ; of the 
mystery of electrical force; of the mystery of the union 
of soul and body; of the mystery of the will; of the 
mystery of Gk)d's sovereignty and man's freedom ; of the 
mystery of the incarnation; of the mystery of the new 
birth; of the mystery of death and immortality; of the 
mystery of the Trinity; of the mystery of a blade of 
grass. In all these cases, diverse as they are, we mean 
by the word essentially the same thing, and it is sub- 
stantially what we meant when we found the mystery of 
attractive force drawing bodies together: we mean that 
the subject of our thoughts is greater than any statements 

25 



IMMORTALITY: A STUDY OF BELIEF 

than we can make about it ; that after all has been said, 
when all our knowledge has been well laid out and classi- 
fied, there is a vast deep stretching away beneath and 
beyond; that the subject of our thought is beyond our 
grasping, and we see no way to make it otherwise. Even 
concerning the knowledge that we possess and are able 
to make good use of, we are compelled to say, "Such 
knowledge is too wonderful for me ; it is high, I cannot 
attain unto it." 

Not that the sense of mystery is always encountered in 
the same manner, or awakens the same sensations. There 
are at least two forms of experience about it, and of these 
we need to think. Sometimes we feel that the facts are 
simply too great for us; and sometimes we are startled 
and perplexed to find that the facts seem to us incon- 
sistent with one another. The sense of mystery is some- 
times the simple sense of the surpassing greatness of the 
things with which we have to do, and sometimes the 
dreadful sense that these great things do not harmonize 
together, but contradict one another and are irreconcil- 
able. The one name of mystery covers these two things, 
widely though they differ. When we ask what makes the 
heart keep beating, what keeps the blood aflow, how vocal 
organs convey thought from mind to mind, we answer 
that these matters are veiled in mystery, and the answer 
is true. But by this confession we are not troubled, we 
are only awed, and thrilled with wonder, and impelled 
to seek deeper for understanding of the matter, if by any 
means we may come to know it through and through. 
In the realm to which we give the general name of 
science, this is the interpretation that we oftenest give 
to mystery; it is the veil of greatness, that hides from 
us the full meaning of the things that we are bending 
over. Mystery thus viewed does not trouble us, but lures 
us on ; we desire to dispel it for our own satisfaction, and 
yet we can endure it with full contentment. Mystery, we 

26 



MYSTERY IN RELIGION 

feel, is the inseparable companion of our ignorance ; if it 
always remains, that will simply mean that the universe 
is too vast for us, and its meaning too deep for our 
comprehension. But in the realm of religion our experi- 
ence is apt to be different. When we ask (to take an 
illustration familiar beyond almost all others) how it is 
that God is God indeed, with that control over his works 
which he must have if he is true God at all, and man is 
nevertheless that free and responsible being which he 
knows himself, and which religion itself requires that he 
must be, we answer still that these matters are veiled in 
mystery, but we do not say it in the same tone as before. 
Our tone is often troubled. The two things seem incom- 
patible. One of the two, God's sovereignty or man's 
freedom, perhaps one and perhaps the other, may appear 
to us certainly and necessarily true, while the other seems 
inconsistent with it. Yet both seem taught us by highest 
authority, and both seem necessarily a part of the world 
that God made and man lives in. This we call a mystery 
— a mystery, namely, that two things should seem incom- 
patible and yet both be true. In the realm to which we 
give the name of religion, mystery is the name that is 
often given to the heartbreaking sense of the reality of 
the impossible. Things contradictory coexist, and this 
is mystery, and mystery dark and troublesome. 

Hence in the world of religion there has often been 
resort to a relief that in the world of science has never 
been sought. In religion it has sometimes been taught 
that mysteries that troubled us and seemed insoluble 
were matters that lay above reason, or beyond reason. 
It has not been admitted that they were contrary to 
reason, but that they were above it or beyond its field 
has often been proposed as a relief to our perplexity. 

This proposal for relief will prove our best guide into 
the truth concerning mystery in religion, and what it 
really is. If we see in what sense this is wise counsel and 

27 



IMMORTALITY: A STUDY OF BELIEF 

in what sense it is not, we shall be better able to estimate 
mystery. Now at the outset we must hold it fast, as a 
thing eternally certain, that in the universe of God there 
is absolutely nothing that is either above reason or beyond 
reason. When we are told that any mystery of his uni- 
verse is above reason or beyond it, we are told what is not 
true. God is himself the perfect and eternal reason. His 
work is rational. The universe is an expression of the 
eternal reason. When we find something that we cannot 
understand, it is not open to us to say that here something 
has slipped in that rational processes cannot account for. 
Nothing that exists in any world is to be explained by 
releasing it from under the sway of reason. This we 
must hold fast forever. But we may freely admit that 
some mystery that we have encountered is above our 
reason or beyond our reason, in its present state and with 
its present data. Some mystery may even present facts 
that are against reason, or irrational, to us today, with 
our untrained powers and limited knowledge. The most 
reasonable truth may be unreasonable to a mind that does 
not see it in full true light. To us, narrow, childish and 
untaught, with scant sympathy with the eternal mind and 
heart in its infinite reasonableness, many things may be 
beyond rational explanation for the present, which we 
have only to see as they are, to call them very truths of 
the eternal reason. 

Perhaps this is what is meant, when things mysterious 
in religion are declared to be above reason or beyond it. 
Perhaps it is meant simply that they are now beyond or 
above the human reason that is seeking to understand 
them. If this, which is often true, is what is meant, this 
is what ought to be said; for it is most misleading and 
dangerous to use language that seems to declare anything 
in God's world to be essentially beyond the field of reason. 
To affirm such a thing is to deny that the eternal reason 
has universal sway, and thus to leave ourselves in mental 

28 



MYSTERY IN RELIGION 

darkness from which there is no reHef till this denial 
is withdrawn. To limit the field of reason is to limit the 
field of God. Mystery is not to be relieved by saying 
that God has no dominion over it. 

The truth is, that mystery in religion is like mystery 
in science, or anywhere else. Let us breathe the secret. 
The mystery always seems to reside in the thing that is 
studied, but it does not. The cause of the mystery 
resides in the mind that is studying. Mystery is the 
effect of greatness upon minds that are unequal to it, or 
are insufficiently informed. 

Do not doubt this, but behold it illustrated and con- 
firmed. We speak of the mystery of life in ourselves, 
of the union of mind and body, the nature of the vital 
process, the meaning of that dissolution which we call 
death. We confess that we have no key to the mystery, 
and probably shall not find one; life eludes the living, 
and how it is that we live we are not likely to know. 
But never for a moment do we doubt that there is a 
rational explanation of the mystery somewhere. We 
know that life is rational; that there is no essential 
mystery in life itself, or in the union of body and soul, 
or in the great dissolution; that these realities all have 
their method, which is absolutely a reasonable method, 
and one that rational powers, even our own, could grasp, 
if it were fully placed before them. We, with our child- 
ish powers and training and our fragmentary knowledge, 
do not hold the clue for rational interpretation, but we 
know that there is a clue. The mystery has its cause 
in us. 

Or, look at what we call a most mysterious element in 
external nature, electricity. We watch the play of this 
marvelous agent, rending the sky in the lightning, color- 
ing the north in the aurora borealis, carrying man's mes- 
sages in the telegraph and his voice in the telephone, 
bringing him light and heat and tractive energy, moving 

29 



IMMORTALITY: A STUDY OF BELIEF 

through all nature, doing things most unexpected and 
accomplishing what seemed impossible; and we stand 
awed, excited, quivering with eagerness, before the mys- 
tery of this weird invisible, enemy and friend at once 
to man. But we never for a moment imagine that there 
is any real mystery about it, mystery essential and insolu- 
ble. We know that electricity has its method, as strict 
and invariable, as rational and right, as the method of 
any other element in the universe. We know that both 
its nature and its working would be perfectly intelligible 
to any rational mind that had the due range of power 
and information. The secret of all mystery that we find 
in electricity lies in us, and in our ignorance. 

These illustrations, one from nature and one from life, 
agree in confirming this, that what God has made is 
rationally plain, but is mysterious to us because it is too 
great for us. Our subject this evening, mystery in reli- 
gion, provides a third illustration, to precisely the same 
effect. Mystery in religion is like other mystery ; it arises 
from imperfect understanding of what is rational and in- 
telligible enough, but is too great for us at present to 
understand. Hear now the word of the Lord concerning 
the things that he has made. All things in the universe 
of God are rational, plain and free from mystery, pro- 
vided only there is a mind great enough to comprehend 
them and judge them as they are. It is a straightfor- 
ward, honorable universe, conducted according to eternal 
reason by the holy and gracious God. To the one Mind 
that is great enough to comprehend it, it contains no 
mysteries. But to our minds, only just now created in 
God's image, untrained to high thinking and unexperi- 
enced in the noblest love, it is a realm of mystery. It is 
too great for us, and mystery is our name for its great- 
ness beyond our range. The secret of the mystery lies 
not in that which God has made, which to him is abso- 

30 



MYSTERY IN RELIGION 

lutely clear and plain, but in the limitation of our powers 
and knowledge. 

In this light we can understand the two effects of mys- 
tery already mentioned, one sad and perplexing, the other 
inspiring and joyful. We look upon things too great for 
us to comprehend, and they seem not to agree well 
together. Contradictions appear to us inherent in the 
universal frame. The mystery alarms us, for we cannot 
find the unity that is indispensable to rest for our souls. 
This is one result. But on the other hand we may be 
charmed by the mystery that hangs as a veil over all 
things great, and over all things because all are great. 
We gaze because of what we clearly see, and not less 
because every look suggests far more than it reveals. 
Seeing so much more beyond, we glow with hope of what 
may yet be opened to us. This is the other result. Both 
are intelligible, when once we know what mystery really 
is. 

But the same knowledge teaches us that one of these 
results should be temporary, while the other abides for- 
ever. Mystery of contradiction, with all its power to 
afflict our souls, fades away in presence of settled belief 
in the rationality of God. The rationality of God is an 
eternal guaranty against the existence of essential con- 
tradictions in that which he has made : and settled belief 
in the divine rationality has inexpressible power to soothe 
and heal the troubled soul. When we have learned this 
lesson, and are sure that God has produced no essential 
and insoluble mysteries, since his eternal reason reigns 
supreme, then we may drop our fears of mystery, as if 
it might be fatal to our peace, and permit it to be the 
glorious thing that God intends. Well knowing God our 
Father, we part company with the heartbreaking mys- 
teries, even though the facts that forced them on us still 
remain. Do we ask — to turn at once to the greatest of 
them all — whether the problem of evil must not darken 

31 



IMMORTALITY: A STUDY OF BELIEF 

all our days? We answer that it is a problem dark and 
terrible, to questioners who stand where we stand, able 
to see so small a section even of this present human 
world, ignorant of so much that is known to God. We 
confess that the problem of evil is too great for us, and 
is dark enough to darken all our day. But we add this 
to our answer, that to God there is no problem of evil. 
He understands. To him, this whole field lies open, clear 
and plain. Surely we do not doubt it ? We do not think 
that he too is like one of us, in the dark about his own 
work, not understanding what he has in hand ? To think 
this is to deny that he is God at all. Faith rises to affirm 
that to the eternal reason the problem of evil is all clear, 
and the world is worthy of God. When we believe this, 
the problem is changed for us. Evil is not changed, but 
we know that there is One who understands it : and we 
can go our way fighting it, free from the heartbreaking 
fear that this enemy may yet conquer our faith and lead 
us prisoners to the castle of despair. 

For our present purpose, therefore, we may leave these 
mysteries of contradiction, and turn with swelling hearts 
to that realm where mystery in religion is either a veil 
upon glory, or glory itself. Concerning this mystery 
which is mystery of greatness — mystery of breadth and 
length and depth and height — I desire that we may 
reverently think together now. This field of unutterable 
wonder does not belong to religion alone. ]\Iystery in 
religion is simply a department of universal mystery, 
and it has the same meaning as mystery everywhere. 

I know how commonplace it is to say that mystery is 
everywhere. It has been said a thousand times, yet I 
may say it again, and for a moment I must dwell upon it. 
The fact is, that we shall not think rightly of mystery in 
the realm of religion, until we know by experience what 
it is to see mystery everywhere, and consciously to walk 
as men encompassed by it on every side. Walk up on a 

32 



MYSTERY IN RELIGION 

bright morning by the path that leads through the woods 
to the door of our Seminary, and tell me how many 
mysteries you have passed in coming : how many, I mean, 
of those things that may be perfectly familiar to you, 
indeed, but baffle you hopelessly if you seek to know them 
thoroughly. Lift your eyes to the sun, or let them fall 
upon the tiny moss beside the path. Think of the trees 
in their beauty, or of the decaying mould at their feet, 
or of the seed that the tree yields and the mould nour- 
ishes. Think of the insect life that is hidden away in the 
earth, or of the birds that sing in the branches. Hold up 
the mirror of thought to yourself, a spirit that sees and 
knows, and takes wondering note of all the life and 
beauty, and is aware of mysteries. Which of all these 
objects that you observe can you account for? Which 
can you expound as if you understood it ? How far into 
any of them can you look ? Some true things about them 
you can say, but how soon you reach your limit ! Only 
notice what radical mysteries are here. You feel the 
mystery of life, to which you know no solution — life in 
tree, in insect and in man. Where there is life and 
where there is none, you come alike upon the mystery of 
matter, the problem what it is; and you cannot solve it. 
Whatever the object of your thought may be, living or 
not living, you encounter the great underlying, universal 
mystery of existence — how anything came to exist, and 
what existence signifies. Your walk through the woods 
is a walk through the world of mystery, and so is every 
walk that you ever take, in places strange or familiar, 
amid objects great or small: while meantime you carry 
in your own person all these mysteries — the mystery of 
existence, the mystery of matter and the mystery of life, 
together with the crowning mystery of the soul, able to 
estimate mysteries and seek to solve them. Thus full of 
mystery is the actual world in which we live. Not by 
invention do we find it so, but by discovery. Closed eyes 

33 



IMMORTALITY: A STUDY OF BELIEF 

do not see it, but when our eyes are open, behold, this is 
the world in which we are. We do not live according to 
truth until we see mystery everywhere, and our daily 
consciousness is pervaded by th£ sense of it. 

As to the real nature and meaning of the universal 
mystery, our illustration from our own bit of wildwood 
will lead us to the truth concerning it, as well as any 
that we could discover. What is the mystery, ever present 
and ever eluding us, in this bit of forest? Need I speak 
the word? It is no other than the mystery of God him- 
self. Here, as I have said, we encounter the mystery 
of life, the mystery of matter and the mystery of exist- 
ence. What, and whence, is the life of tree and fern, of 
insect, bird and squirrel? What is the inorganic matter 
in our grove, and what qualities does it possess? and 
what fits it to serve as the organ and medium of life? 
And how came the whole into being? and what does its 
existence signify? Concerning all this we may have our 
theories of creation or evolution, as we find reason for 
them, but they do not go to the depths of the question. 
Life, matter and existence have their ground and source 
in God. The mystery that haunts our forest day and 
night is the mystery of God himself, of his activity, of 
his indwelling, of his relation to the things upon which we 
look. This is that mystery which eludes us, that unseen 
reality which underlies all that we see. How he is 
related to his creation, and his creation to him ; how he 
touches the things that are, and holds them in being; 
what power and love flow forth from him into his works, 
and what he means by it all: these are the unanswered 
questions that look out upon us in our little forest, and 
everywhere we go. When we know all about God, we 
shall know all about this bit of wildwood, and only then. 
That underlying greatness which all nature shows us in 
glimpses but does not reveal is God himself. 

34 



MYSTERY IN RELIGION 

This oneness of mystery, the mystery of God in all, is 
what Tennyson has expressed in the well-known lines : 

Flower in the crannied wall, 

I pluck you out of the crannies, 
Hold you here, root and all, in my hand, 
Little flower — but if I could understand 
What you are, root and all, and all in all, 
I should know what God and man is. 

Nothing could be more true. One mystery underlies all 
things, and it is the mystery of God. This, we must now 
notice, is the same as to say that all mystery everywhere, 
in nature, life and mind, leads directly on into the heart 
of our subject this evening. All roads lead hither, to the 
mystery of the self -revealing God ; and this is the mystery 
of religion. 

Note the difference, however. In religion, we meet 
the universal mystery in the region of the spirit. We are 
working in the realm where God moves farthest, if we 
may say so, toward his creation, and makes his closest 
approach to the highest creature that he has placed in the 
world. In religion we encounter the mystery of spiritual 
contact and influence. Religion rests upon the fact that 
"spirit with Spirit can meet" — man can commune with 
God, and God can dwell in man. Here we encounter the 
mystery of providence, the mystery of redeeming love 
and help, the mystery of spiritual intercourse, the mys- 
tery of transformation. Mystery in religion is the mys- 
tery of God and the soul together. 

Concerning the depth of this spiritual mystery, I should 
be inclined to say two things. On the one hand, I should 
expect this mystery of God and the soul to be pro founder 
than any other. If there is really any difference in mys- 
teries and one is deeper than another, I should expect 
the deepest to be found where God, with the immensity 
of his spiritual resources, touches conscious, voluntary, 
responsible souls, intending to influence them and change 

35 



IMMORTALITY: A STUDY OF BELIEF 

their character. Compared with this, it seems to me, the 
work of God upon that which we call matter must be 
simple. His relation to matter is deeply wonderful, 
indeed : but the relation of the infinite Spirit to the finite 
spirit which it has created and is now befriending — a 
finite spirit free and responsible, and willful too — is still 
more deeply mysterious. And yet I should say, on the 
other hand, that the mystery of God's contact with the 
soul of man would be more intelligible than any mystery 
of God in matter. The contact of spirit with spirit is 
more intelligible than the contact of spirit with anything 
else. We may not be more able to explain it, but we have 
more in our own experience to illustrate it. We are on 
more familiar ground, and have more to guide our under- 
standing, when we speak of God and man in fellowship, 
than when we speak of the mystery of God in nature. 
Here the relations are at least personal : and so the deep- 
est mystery of God is after all the one on which we have 
the clearest light to help us. For this we may well give 
thanks. 

Even more should we give thanks for the character of 
the mystery that we find in religion — I mean in religion 
as we know it in Jesus Christ. Mystery here is glorious 
and inspiring, for it is revealing mystery, mystery not so 
much of darkness as of light. It glorifies more than it 
obscures. In it we see things that prophets and kings, 
philosophers and scientists, have desired to see but have 
not seen them. In the light of it we see 

Earth crammed with heaven, 
And every common bush afire with God.' 

Only remember what the mystery is with which we are 
now concerned. When we speak of religion, we are 
moving in that realm in which God comes nearest. The 
great insoluble is no other than the question how he can 
come so near, and how things can be as they are in so 

36 



MYSTERY IN RELIGION 

close a presence of his gracious glory, and what new 
wonders his presence is destined to bring forth. 

The real mystery of the spiritual contact of God with 
man is not mystery that suggests denial, or even doubt. 
It is not the stumbHng, blundering wonder whether God 
has any spiritual contact with man. We know that he 
has. Spirit and spirit do meet. The life of religion is 
the life of our souls in such contact. To us, in Christ, 
the great fact is a living reality. We are not talking of 
an unanswerable question whether this can come to pass, 
but of the glorious mystery of the fact that this does come 
to pass, and of the mysterious glory that radiates from 
this truth and fills the world with the heavenly brightness 
of a living hope. 

Think first of the mystery of God's self-revelation. 
That he does express himself to men ; that he finds means 
of making himself known in humanity ; that he was able 
to come in Jesus Christ, and make a revelation of his 
character full and clear, and tender, holy, glorious, a 
revelation such as man could never have imagined; that 
the unseen God stands thus manifest among us, showing 
in a human life what manner of God he is : — ^this is the 
real mystery of religion, so far as God's self -revelation 
is concerned. This is a glorious mystery for us to walk 
in, and to walk wondering. Do we ask how it occurred? 
by what process God was thus manifest in the flesh ? and 
do we find that we cannot wholly explain it? Do we 
locate the mystery of God's revelation in the incompre- 
hensibleness of the incarnation ? Is this the mystery that 
fixes our attention ? It is true that here our explanations 
fail us, less or more, but we mistake if our chief wonder 
lies in this quarter. Mystery of this kind we can trust 
to the reasonableness of God. We know and are sure 
that he does only what the highest reason dictates. If we 
should never be able fully to solve the problem of the 
incarnation — which may well prove to be the case — we 

37 



IMMORTALITY: A STUDY OF BELIEF 

could rest in this, that what God does is absolutely ra- 
tional, and there is nothing dark or perplexing in it, if 
only the whole were known. Of the fact that God has 
shown himself among men in Christ, we are certain : and 
the mystery that we have most to do with is the mysteri- 
ous glory that hangs about this fact. In the presence of 
such a revelation we walk wondering. What glory and 
what wonder that God should come, and his tabernacle 
should be among men, and he should dwell among them ! 
What a character is thus revealed! What heights and 
depths of glory does it contain! How dimly is it seen 
thus far, despite the clearness of his revealing! Who 
knows what light is yet to stream forth upon the world 
from that same face of Jesus Christ in which we see the 
glory? How divinely the light of that character irra- 
diates all that it falls upon ! How it solves the problem 
of life ! How it opens new mysteries too, but only to 
bring in due time a divine solution! What superabun- 
dance of fullness there is in this revelation of God ! what 
undeveloped possibilities of grace and truth and life! 
The latent possibilities of good in Christ He before us 
with infinite attractiveness. We do not wish that we 
could see all there is in him. So winning a mystery is 
something to receive with thankfulness, and to wait upon 
with joyful hope. 

Think also of the mystery of God's contact with the 
individual soul through the Holy Spirit. Here the life 
of personal religion begins, and in this realm it has its 
being. We might stand perplexed — as many do — be- 
cause we could not tell how God is able to communicate 
thus secretly and powerfully with a human soul. The 
question moves in a region where we are ignorant. How 
one human soul acts upon another we do not know and 
are not likely to discover ; much less how God acts upon 
a man. But here again we find our peace in the rational- 
ity of God. He will never violate the nature he has 

38 



MYSTERY IN RELIGION 

created, or in anything act against the perfect reason. 
We know that a solution of the mystery of spiritual influ- 
ence exists, and is a perfect and reasonable solution, 
worthy of God. In other words, we know that there is no 
real mystery here, but only a mystery to our ignorance. 
But as to the fact itself, that God does touch the human 
spirit with a holy, friendly, renewing influence, and work 
in it the purpose of his grace — as to this we have no 
doubt; and this is a fact alive and glowing with mys- 
terious energies. What a world of possibilities does it 
open, for us to wonder, pray and work in ! A missionary 
was founding a new station on the Congo, and obtained 
the service of natives to bring him timber from the forest, 
to erect a house in which he might serve them in the 
Lord. Watching them at the work, he wrote, "How little 
do they suspect that after a time they will begin to be 
moved with strange troublings in the spirit, which they 
cannot cure for themselves but must be cured of by the 
invisible God, and that these inward movings will be 
connected with their bringing of these sticks to me !" He 
was contemplating the mystery of the present God, now 
working in the silence of the human soul. He was walk- 
ing in the wonder of that glorious and inspiring mystery. 
Explain it ? That was the least of his need. To glory in 
it, to see the world irradiated with the light of such possi- 
bilities as it suggests, and to promote the free working of 
this invisible but heavenly power: this is the use that 
should be made of a mystery divine. "The things that 
are impossible to men are possible to God": this is the 
keynote of the new song. It is a note of mystery, for it 
declares the possibility of the impossible, through the 
working of a more than human agent. That new song of 
which this is the keynote is the song with which we may 
gladden day and night, if we do but learn what use to 
make of the mystery of the present God. 

Turn for a moment to one of the analogies of nature. 

39 



IMMORTALITY: A STUDY OF BELIEF 

The mystery of God's spiritual touch upon man is very 
Hke the mystery of electricity as it stands today. Here 
is an element in nature, to which we have given a name, 
though we know little about it. Just what it is we may 
find out, but we are not waiting for that before we use it. 
It has already accomplished wonders under the hand of 
man, and stands ready to accomplish more. At present 
the question is, what it is to do next, and how far its 
revolutionary work is to go. When we speak of the 
mystery of electricity, we may refer to the unsolved 
questions as to its nature : but we may just as well refer 
to its possibilities. Here is a mighty agent : the world is 
full of it, and its energy is immeasurable. Oh, the mys- 
tery of such a force, evidently able to do far more than we 
have seen, ready whenever we are ready, to serve us by 
working new and unimagined wonders ! Oh, the marvel 
of a world thus full of a tremendous energy! Oh, the 
wonder of the boundless possibilities ! This mighty pres- 
ence in the world fills us with a sense of mystery, corre- 
sponding to its unmeasured but waiting power. 

There is another mighty agent in the world, this time a 
personal agent, moved by heart and will. God is here, 
in immediate contact and intercourse with men. God is 
here, the Holy Spirit. There is none like him. Already 
has he wrought wonders of spiritual transformation. He 
has made a people for his own possession, imperfect yet 
truly his own. He has wrought upon innumerable men, 
suggesting what is holy, effecting repentance, awakening 
faith, transforming character. He has had part in all 
worthy works that men have performed, and not without 
him has any good thing been done. We may find the 
mystery of the present God in the mode of his operation ; 
but we shall do better to feel the mystery of the present 
God as a mystery of pervading power and boundless pos- 
sibility. What will he do next ? How next will his king- 
dom come and his will be done ? The world is athrill with 

40 



MYSTERY IN RELIGION 

the spiritual energy of God, and we are athrill with inter- 
est in what will come of it. We look about us and try to 
forecast the divine working. He who can make one new 
creature can make a million ; he who can change men can 
change society. What is coming next? Where will he 
bring his holiness and love to bear upon our evil ? What 
is the next great battle? Some battle worthy of God is 
certain to come on ; what will it be ? In what form will 
the infinite holiness and love be manifested, in setting 
right the relations between man and man and class and 
class, and bringing in the new heavens and the new earth 
wherein dwelleth righteousness? When will the Mighty 
One be victorious? Here lies the inspiring mystery of 
the present God — a glorious mystery of divine possibili- 
ties (say rather of divine certainties yet unseen), in which 
we do well to walk with open eyes and open hearts. As 
we climb our hill thrilling with the sense of the mystery 
of God in his creation, so we should walk all the ways 
of life aglow with the sense of the mystery of God present 
in the Spirit of his grace. 

I need not say that it is in this same world of mystery 
that we are called to study. In everything that we touch, 
in the realm of theology and religion, there is present the 
whole greatness of God. There are matters of fact to 
come before us, indeed, on which we can reach clear cer- 
tainty. Questions of historical evidence, for example, 
are to be settled in the light of common day. But when 
we come to the substance of religion itself, here is noth- 
ing small, nothing limited, nothing completely compre- 
hended. Nowhere has human understanding found the 
end. Everywhere wide vistas of possible knowledge open 
out before us. On every subject what we know is but a 
glimpse of what we may know. Flashes of the glory of 
God break out upon us from places where we fancied 
there was only darkness, or dimness at the best. Progress 
in the knowledge of God is endless. In such a world of 

41 



IMMORTALITY: A STUDY OF BELIEF 

divine mystery, study is no light and easy thing. The 
very facts that make it glorious make it absorbing and 
exacting. In studying religion, we are always studying 
God himself, in some form or part of his relation to men, 
and our entire work reaches out into the divine infinitude. 
Can we work slightly here, or judge rashly, or be child- 
ishly overconfident? Shall we expect always to under- 
stand what we find in this realm of thought? We believe 
in the rationality of God, and are sure that we are study- 
ing what is true and reasonable; but we are constantly 
confronted by the deepest mysteries of being, and such 
knowledge is too wonderful for us, it is high, we cannot 
attain unto it. We encounter all the mystery that belongs 
to God's own depth and greatness, height and majesty. 
Often in the midst of our studies shall we be constrained 
to pause, and bow in reverence, and say, "Oh, the depth 
of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God ! 
How unsearchable are his judgments, and his ways past 
finding out ! For from him, and by him, and for him, 
are all things : to whom be glory forever. Amen." 

I do not wish to leave the subject without a few words 
upon what mystery in religion does for us. It is an ele- 
ment that we are sometimes inclined to resent. We 
almost think ourselves deprived of our rights if we can- 
not make clear statements that cover the whole field. 
Vagueness we suspect to be weakness, whatever the cause 
of it. A state in which there shall be no mystery often 
seems the state to be desired. We shall do well therefore 
to put mystery in its right place, and see what we owe 
to it. 

I think it is plain from what has been said that mystery 
is not the same as uncertainty. If this is not plain, I 
cannot make it so. The things most certain to us are to 
us the most mysterious. And I think it must also be 
plain that mystery does not always imply real obscurity. 
Many a subject is profoundly mysterious to us that is not 

42 



MYSTERY IN RELIGION 

obscure, in any such manner as to work real perplexity 
in our minds. Mystery underlies and overhangs the 
whole, but is not where it gives us difficulty. It is whole- 
some to note these facts, which may somewhat clear our 
vision in a world of mystery, and prepare us to estimate 
our debt to mystery aright. 

Shall I dare to say that mystery gives us religion? It 
is almost true. Certainly we may say. No mystery, no 
religion. If we did not live in a world of spiritual reality 
so profound as to be mysterious, no thought of such a 
thing as religion would ever arise. Religion is the out- 
reach of the soul into the unseen. If there were no un- 
seen realm in which the soul felt interest and knew that 
it had vast necessities, the whole realm that is now occu- 
pied by religion would be a blank. So we do well to be 
glad of this all-surrounding atmosphere of mystery, in 
which religion lives and moves and has its being. Let us 
not complain of it, as if we should be better off without 
it. It is the sphere in which our noblest blessings come to 
meet us. No mystery, no religion, whether in the earthly 
life or in the ever expanding heavenly. 

For example, it is in the realm of mystery that we 
pray. Life is too great for us, duty is too solemn and 
difficult, and destiny too overwhelming: we cannot go 
alone. Moreover, we have within us that mysterious im- 
pulse to speak out into the unseen, sure that there is some- 
one there to hear. Greatest fact and mystery of all, there 
is the present God, surrounding us ever, and available for 
help to the soul that relies upon him. There is a Father, 
full of grace and truth, whom our eyes do not behold, and 
whose nearness and goodness we can learn by faith and 
experience alone. Here are all the suitable conditions for 
prayer : and prayer has risen, the wide world through, to 
meet them. But leave the mystery out, and what would 
prayer be ? If it could exist at all, it could be nothing but 
plain talk, no greater than it appears, unsuggestive, unin- 

43 



IMMORTALITY: A STUDY OF BELIEF 

spiring, prosaic, barren. Unmeasured aspiration, desires 
too great for words, "groanings that cannot be uttered," 
longings that reach out into the undiscovered country, 
the awe and rapture of standing in the unseen presence 
of holiness and glory, the bHss of communing with invisi- 
ble love — where would all these be if mystery were elim- 
inated from our life ? It is in that immeasurable, inesti- 
mable, undiscoverable, which nevertheless is but the 
extension of that which is already ours — it is in this 
that the experimental power of our religion resides. It is 
here that our spiritual being may rise above itself and 
commune with God. 

Moreover, it is only in the realm of mystery that we 
can possibly find due sense of the greatness of truth, and 
of God himself. The true is the real : truth is that which 
is. To know truth is to know that which is. But as a 
matter of fact, that which is is infinitely beyond us, 
stretching out on every side, and the world that is is a 
world of mystery. Only in a world of mystery, therefore, 
can truth, or any truth, be discerned aright. We might 
be trained, I know, to suppose truth capable of perfect 
definition, with all lines distinct and final : and we might 
think ourselves doing it best justice when we craved 
comprehensive statements that could be carried, state- 
ments compact, neat, and sufficient for a lifetime. But 
truth is not such that it can thus be carried complete in 
handy form. Our clearest statements are often clear be- 
cause they are inadequate: we can make them neat be- 
cause they include so little. That vast element which 
we cannot include in full is essential to the true thought 
of truth : and only when we behold truth shading off into 
the brightness of mystery do we begin to see it as it is. 
And what shall I say of our conception of him concerning 
whom our studies in religion lead us both first and last to 
think? We might imagine that God could be adequately 
set forth in words, and bounded by sharp definitions : but 

44 



MYSTERY IN RELIGION 

we know better. Well do we know that he is far beyond 
us in our utmost reach of thought. If we try to think 
of him without recognizing the mystery of infinity, we 
utterly misconceive him, and think no true thought of him 
at all. We may think of him, with the king, as dwelling 
in the thick darkness, or with the apostle, as dwelling in 
light unapproachable, or with the prophet, as inhabiting 
eternity; in any case we must admit to our thought the 
element of mystery, or we cannot know him as he is. 
Omit this, and we worship a God narrowed to our own 
dimensions, and a God who never lived. Thus whatever 
true sense we have of his eternal greatness and glory we 
owe to our living in the world of mystery. 

If religion is indebted to the fact of mystery, so is theol- 
ogy. The influence of mystery upon our thinking in 
theology is wondrously ennobling. Need I dwell upon it ? 
When do we grow narrow, unspiritual, and unable to dis- 
cern the things of God ? When we think we know it all : 
when we fancy that our definitions fence in the field. The 
sense of mystery, as we have seen, is the sense of large- 
ness in the truth we deal with. It humbles us. Here 
everything at last is rational and intelligible, but every- 
thing is infinite — and who is he that thinks himself ready 
to know it all ? If once we thoroughly learn the lesson of 
our own littleness in the midst of the infinite, then indeed 
it begins to be possible for us to know aright. Mystery 
teaches us our littleness. Yet at the same time, how the 
mystery that attends religion quickens our minds, wakens 
our hearts, inspires our adoration, stirs our deepest long- 
ings, and irresistibly attracts our zeal ! In such a world 
as that of religion, who can rest without reaching out to 
that which is still beyond ? This attraction is inexhausti- 
ble, because God is infinite. It will remain with us, or we 
with it, forever. "While life and thought and being last," 
God will still be mysterious to created spirits, and the 
charm of pressing on to know the Lord will be upon us. 

45 



IMMORTALITY: A STUDY OF BELIEF 

Clearness of perception and statement is good, and we 
will strive for it, in its place, and we shall ever be gaining 
more of it as we go on: and yet the clearer our thought 
of him whom our souls love, the farther off into infinity 
will stretch our vision of that which we have yet to learn 
concerning him. Mystery, rightly used, is never the death 
of clearness ; rather is it the life without which clearness 
itself is dead. 

It is by due recognition of the real mystery of religion 
that we can avoid making our theology too mysterious. 
In this realm there are mysteries, and mysteries. The 
mystery that belongs to the nature of things, the depth of 
reality, and the greatness of God and man, abides forever. 
We would not escape it if we could, for it is the robe of 
the eternal, and the eternal glory shines through it. But 
we can easily make mysteries besides. We can perplex 
ourselves and one another by too sharp defining. We can 
fail to trust the rationality of God, and think we must 
bring all to the measure of our own present rationality. 
Thus we may labor too hard for completeness and con- 
sistency, and make a system so consistent that it agrees 
well with nothing but itself, the world of God and man 
being too large for it. We can bring one thing into oppo- 
sition with another, and state matters infinite so definitely 
as to provoke doubt rather than invite faith. Such diffi- 
culties of oversystematizing, when we have created them, 
we shall very likely call mysteries, and class with the 
mysteries divine amid which God has placed us all : and 
then theology will seem to us to be hopelessly full of 
mysteries, some of them heartbreaking mysteries. 

But if we live and move and have our being in the 
midst of the true mystery of God, we shall be delivered 
from much of the temptation to this harmful method. A 
sense of the real mystery divine is the surest safeguard 
against burdening ourselves with needless mysteries 
human. When we believe in the rationality of God, mys- 

46 



MYSTERY IN RELIGION 

teries that consist in contradiction will retire from our 
field. When we feel the infinity of truth, we shall not be 
overdogmatic, or so limit truth as to make it troublesome 
to faith. When we know our own Httleness in the face 
of the vast unity of truth in God, we shall make our 
systems simple, flexible, free to growth, and the only 
mystery that we are likely to encourage in them is that 
mystery into which we all were born, and in which all 
souls must live forever. 

Within these walls we hope to spend a year together in 
study of the things of God. Let us begin our work in the 
attitude of reverence. How great is God! how great is 
truth ! — ^how much greater than we know, or can ever 
know! With unspeakable reverence let us stand to- 
gether in so solemn a presence. Let us be humbly glad 
of our calling to be students of God, and take the place 
of little children learning at our Father's feet. Yet let us 
enter upon our year of work with eagerness and hope. 
Upon how vast and inspiring a field of study are we 
entering ! The one thing that we know is, that it stretches 
infinitely beyond our present vision, and is full, both near 
and far, of the riches of God's grace and truth. Rich 
returns await our labor, in the revelation of God and the 
gift of his truth, to every soul that is in earnest. Eagerly 
therefore let us go forward to our labor, being sure that 
the God whom we are seeking to know will be known 
of us, and will do for us exceeding abundantly above all 
that we ask or think. 



47 



THE WORK OF CHRIST FOR OUR 
SALVATION* 

That in Jesus Christ there was performed a work for 
the salvation of us men, all Christians have held, but just 
what that work was and what it meant, they have not 
all discerned alike. There is a long history of doctrine 
on the subject, in the course of which interpretation after 
interpretation has arisen, no one of which has sufficed for 
universal satisfaction. The ordinary Christian belief of 
today inherits from all of these without knowing it. The 
ordinary Christian belief may suppose itself to be the 
ancient and original, and to have sure promise of per- 
manence ; yet the interpretation of the work of Christ has 
changed so often as to assure us that it may change again, 
and to warn us of our duty to inquire what is the inter- 
pretation that we ought to hold at the present hour. 

There is one very simple question about the work of 
Christ, not often distinctly stated or discussed, which 
nevertheless leads into the very heart of the subject, and 
is available for help not only to theologians but to all 
thoughtful Christians. This question relates to the action 
that was put forth in the work of Christ for our salva- 
tion, and to the direction in which it moved. There was 
action put forth in Christ's work: Which way did it 
move? What was its direction? Toward what was it 
aimed, and where did it take effect? In the course of 

* Given in June, 1900, before the Friends' Summer School of 
Theology, at Haverford College. Published in Present Day 
Papers, August, 1900. Editor, J. Wilhelm Rowntree, Bishopsgate, 
London. 

48 



WORK OF CHRIST FOR OUR SALVATION 

the history this question has been variously answered, and 
it will be profitable to recount the answers to it that the 
history of doctrine yields. Such inquiry will lead up to 
the present state of the question, and prepare us to answer 
the question at present for ourselves. 

There was an ancient doctrine, long current, to the 
effect that the life of Christ was paid by God as a ransom 
to Satan, who as the lord of evil held captive the souls 
that were given to sin. Jesus said that he was to give 
his life a ransom for many; and to whom should a 
ransom be paid but to the one who holds the captives? 
So God, by giving his son to death, purchased from the 
devil the men whom he would save. For a thousand 
years there was no well-formulated doctrine of the work 
of Christ,, but during that long period this came as near 
as anything to being the defined and accepted theory. 

This earliest doctrine illustrates our question, while it 
provides one characteristic answer to it. According to 
this idea, the action in Christ's work proceeded from God. 
It was God's own action, and was directed toward sin, or 
toward Satan as the representative of sin. It was not 
directed or addressed to God at all, but was purely God's 
action, directed toward the evil from which he sought to 
deliver men. 

In the eleventh century, Anselm introduced a new in- 
terpretation, in which this movement was reversed. It 
was a philosophical or theological theory, not biblical in 
character, founded on governmental relations between 
God and men. According to this doctrine, men owe to 
God perfect obedience, loyalty, and love, but they have not 
given it. Sin, in which all are involved, has thus robbed 
God of what is rightfully his due, and has at the same 
time grievously insulted his infinite majesty. From men 
there is therefore due to God in view of sin an infinite 
satisfaction. Every man owes to God a debt too great to 
be estimated, and the total obligation of mankind to God 

49 



IMMORTALITY: A STUDY OF BELIEF 

because of sin is simply infinite. If this satisfaction is 
ever to be paid to God, it must be paid by man, for from 
man it is due, and from no other quarter can the payment 
be accepted. But mankind is hopelessly incapable of pay- 
ing it. Hence God, desiring to save men, himself becomes 
man by incarnation in the person of Jesus Christ, in order 
that the God-man may do, from within humanity, that 
necessary thing which is otherwise impossible. Christ the 
God-man dies. Since he is sinless he did not need to die, 
and since he is divine his death is of infinite value; and 
this infinite value in his death is accepted by God as bal- 
ancing the human debt. By this means God is satisfied, 
and salvation is rendered possible. 

Here was a profound revolution from the earlier 
thought. According to this, the action that was put forth 
in the work of Christ was addressed to God, and to God 
alone. It was solely because God required to be satisfied 
on account of human sin that a work of Christ was 
necessary, and the work of Christ did nothing except to 
satisfy the divine requirement. Anselm's theory did not 
touch the experimental human side of salvation, but only 
the divine side, and touched the divine side only so far 
as to show how God is free to save men, now that his 
infinite demand because of sin is satisfied. What Christ 
did took effect upon God, and upon God alone. Christ 
wrought a work upon God. 

Five centuries after Anselm came the Reformation, and 
now for the first time a strictly biblical basis was sought 
for doctrine. Anselm's view of Christ's work corre- 
sponded to a legal relation between God and men, and the 
Anselmic satisfaction was a legal satisfaction. But now 
that the Bible, and the whole Bible, came in as the basis 
of doctrine, a new meaning arose for the conception of 
law. The Mosaic law was now the standard; and the 
Mosaic law, taken to be in the full sense God's own law, 
required on account of sin, not satisfaction after the man- 

50 



WORK OF CHRIST FOR OUR SALVATION 

ner of debt and civil law, but punishment after the man- 
ner of this world's criminal law. The law of God 
demands punishment. As the Reformers read it, the law 
of God denounced the curse of God, extending to eternal 
perdition, upon every sinful being as the penalty of sin ; 
and God's law, or justice, inexorably required that all sin 
be punished. 

In accordance with this change in the nature of God's 
demand, it was natural that the doctrine of the work of 
Christ should undergo a change. The analogies of the 
civil law requiring payment gave place to the analogies of 
criminal law requiring punishment. It was held by the 
Reformers and their successors that what Christ did was 
to endure the penalty of human sin. He was punished 
for us. Of course such a position implied the acceptance 
of a doctrine of substitution, which the Anselmic theory 
had not required. But there was no hesitation at this. 
It was held that Christ really took the sinner's place in 
the sight of God, was regarded by God as sinful, and 
endured what the sinner, and indeed what the sinful 
world ought to have borne. It was held that the immeas- 
urable value of his person as divine imparted to his suffer- 
ings a worth that overbalanced their brevity, and made 
them equal to the punishment of all sin. He endured the 
wrath of God, and, it was sometimes said, the torments 
of the damned, and thus exhausted the claim of God for 
punishment because of sin. 

This change in the doctrine, however, implied no 
change with reference to the point of the present inquiry. 
Christ's work was still a work of satisfaction to God, and 
to God it was still directed. Christ was offering to God 
the endurance of punishment, just as in the Anselmic 
theory he was offering to God the payment of the human 
debt. God required this : God needed this if he was to 
save. But for this necessity there would have been no 
call for a work of Christ. Thus the action in his work 

51 



IMMORTALITY: A STUDY OF BELIEF 

still moved toward God, and terminated and took effect 
upon him. 

Another doctrine soon came in, which has been known 
as the governmental theory of the work of Christ, a 
theory that is most interesting for our present study. 
Here it was held that God is more free than he has 
been thought to be; he is not obliged to demand full 
satisfaction for the human debt or full punishment for 
human sin, but may accept whatever he judges best to 
accept as the ground of merciful dealing with sinful m^en. 
Being thus free, he considers the welfare of his creatures, 
and is satisfied if his merciful dealing with sinners is not 
fairly liable to be understood as trifling with evil. He 
intends to forgive sin, but feels that his government must 
be vindicated as righteous while he shows grace to the 
sinful. Hence Christ suffers. But he does not suffer the 
penalty of sin; this is expressly denied, and it is denied 
that suffering the penalty of sin is necessary. Christ 
endures such suffering that those who behold cannot 
misunderstand God's attitude and suppose him to be 
indifferent to evil while he deals graciously with sinners. 
Christ's suffering vindicates God's government as well as 
punishment would vindicate it, and as well as it needs to 
be vindicated. 

In what direction, according to this theory, does the 
action move ? Though the fact has often been unnoticed, 
this theory marks a complete revolution in the doctrine of 
the work of Christ. Here, at the heart of the matter, 
the action proceeds toward men. The action is God's 
own, intended for vindication of his government. The 
end in view is not the satisfaction of God at all, but the 
convincing of men that God is righteous while he is 
gracious. All that Christ does he does, according to this 
theory, not because some necessity in God's nature de- 
mands it, but because human interests require it. The 
governmental theory of Christ's work is strictly and 

52 



WORK OF CHRIST FOR OUR SALVATION 

thoroughly a moral influence theory. Multitudes of Chris- 
tians, and a host of theologians, have held it supposing it 
to be a satisfaction theory, but it is not. The govern- 
mental theory is not a modification of the Anselmic doc- 
trine or of the substitutionary view; it squarely denies 
the central principle of both, and affirms that the action 
in Christ's work was directed not toward God but toward 
men. 

All moral influence theories are, of course, to the 
same effect. Ever since the Middle Ages the belief has 
now and again arisen that in the work of Christ, God 
himself was the real actor, directing his action toward the 
men whom he desired to bless and save, and that the 
whole endeavor was intended to bring men home to 
God. That God was thus seeking men in Christ, and 
exerting a winning influence upon them, has indeed been 
held by all. But some have held that the seeking to save 
was the sole motive in the coming-forth of the Good 
Shepherd, and that in Christ, God was directing his action 
wholly toward men for their eternal good. 

What is the fair conclusion from this brief review of 
the history? Nothing can be plainer than that on this 
subject Christian thought has been feeling its way. Di- 
rectly opposite positions have been held concerning the 
direction of the endeavor that was put forth in Christ, 
and have sometimes been held without the contradiction 
being noticed. The doctrine has not yet worked itself 
clear. It still has progress to make. More work needs 
to be done upon it. It seems quite possible that the his- 
tory may be leading on to some clearer and more satis- 
factory form than the doctrine has ever yet borne. 

There is one element in the doctrine, however, in 
which all Christians agree ; and it is an element that will 
be helpful toward a better understanding. Toward what- 
ever end the action in Christ's work may have moved, 
there is no doubt as to where it began. Let the whither 

53 



IMMORTALITY: A STUDY OF BELIEF 

be what it may, the whence is clear. It came from God. 
The first thing certain about the work of Christ for our 
salvation is that God is the author of it. "God so loved 
the world that he gave his only begotten Son, that whoso- 
ever believeth in him might not perish but have eternal 
life." "God commendeth his own love toward us in that 
while we were yet sinners Christ died for us." The work 
of Christ is a work of God's own love. All the theories 
represent it so. In the ancient doctrine, it was God who 
bought men from Satan by the ransom that was paid in 
the death of Christ. In the Anselmic theory, it was God 
who provided the God-man through incarnation, in order 
that his own demand for satisfaction might be met. In 
the substitutionary theory of the Reformers, it was God 
who arranged that Christ should bear the penalty of sin 
in the stead of sinners, that his own law might be satis- 
fied. In the governmental theory, it was God who pro- 
vided that his own government should be vindicated by 
the sufferings of Christ. In the moral influence theory, 
of course, it was God who sought through Christ to bring 
sinners to repentance and faith. Thus there is one point 
of universal agreement. Salvation is from God. In what- 
ever direction the work of Christ may have moved, and 
wherever it may have taken effect, the action has always 
been held to have proceeded originally from God, and to 
be in its motive God's own action. Indeed, this is a 
primary Christian fact, so clear and certain that no theory 
could ignore it. 

In some of the theories this primary Christian element 
is perfectly at home and suggests no difficulty. In the 
ancient theory God acts toward Satan. In the moral 
influence theory God acts toward men, whom he desires 
to save. In the governmental theory God acts toward 
men in general, or toward the universe, to give evidence 
of his righteousness. This is all intelligible. But in the 
Anselmic theory, and in the substitutionary theory, God 

54 



WORK OF CHRIST FOR OUR SALVATION 

acts upon himself : and this is not so clear. The action 
is originated and carried through by God, and at the same 
time it terminates and has effect on God, being required 
by necessities that exist in him. This is the same as to 
say that God acts upon himself. This indeed has been 
constantly affirmed. That God in Christ has paid the 
debt that was due to himself, and that God has in Christ 
borne the punishment that his own requirements laid 
upon sinful men, — these statements have been willingly 
accepted. God removing his own difficulties, God meet- 
ing his own demands, God offering satisfaction to his own 
righteousness, God's love satisfying God's justice, — ^these 
have been common designations of the meaning of the 
work of Christ. According to the Anselmic theory and 
all penar substitutionary theories the action in Christ's 
work is God's action, taking effect on God. There is no 
such thing as holding either of these views without hold- 
ing as the very center of the doctrine that in the work of 
Christ God acted and at the same time was acted upon, 
or, in other words, that God acted upon himself. 

Here is at least the suggestion of a difficulty. That 
God acted, we can understand, or that God was acted 
upon: but can both be true of the same action? The 
difficulty that any theory of God acting upon himself has 
to encounter is the difficulty of unreality. We have 
learned of Christ, and it has become necessary, not only 
that we should be able to put our doctrine of God into 
language, but that our language should represent thought 
that we can conceive as real. Christ has taught us that 
God is the most true, genuine, sincere, and straightfor- 
ward of beings. The better we learn of Christ, the more 
unable are we to predicate of God anything self-contra- 
dictory or artificial or unreal. If we try to think of God 
as acting upon himself in order to influence himself we 
find ourselves in the presence of the unreal, and lose the 
divine directness and simplicity. Unreality dwells in the 

55 



IMMORTALITY: A STUDY OF BELIEF 

very idea of God acting upon himself in order to satisfy 
his own demands and enable himself to do what his nature 
requires. If God is a perfect being his attributes never 
conflict with one another or need to be harmonized. 
The nature of a perfect being will not require and forbid 
the same action. If his justice and love need to be har- 
monized he is less than perfect. In a perfect being action 
intended to harmonize these two would be unreal. And 
if God really so loves the world as to give his son to save 
it, and is actually ready to begin the work by the gift of 
Christ, what reality can he be seeing in obstacles that we 
think need to be removed? If the sincere and straight- 
forward God is ready to commend his own love toward 
us by the death of Christ for us while we are yet sinners, 
what can he really need to have done or offered to him 
before he can save us? If, as Paul and John affirm, God 
himself sets forth a propitiation for our sins, how can he 
really need to be propitiated ? and what reality can there 
be in propitiation, in the well-known sense of that ancient 
word ? The clearer our thought of a perfect God, the less 
can we think of him as needing first of all to put forth 
action upon himself, in order that his highest attributes 
may have free course to do their will. Nor do we find 
more real the various accompanying details, out of which 
the theories of God acting upon himself are built up. 
The idea that the relation between God and man is legal : 
the idea that the perfect God thinks first of his own 
majesty and must have satisfaction; the idea that suffer- 
ing can be an equivalent for sin ; the idea that God has 
in mind an equivalent of any kind for sin, or for the 
sum of human sins, or that such an equivalent can exist ; 
the idea that sin against an infinite person is therefore an 
infinite sin ; the idea that punishment can satisfy God for 
moral transgression; the idea that brief sufferings of a 
great person can equal long sufferings of inferior persons ; 
the idea that punishment can be transferred from the 

56 



WORK OF CHRIST FOR OUR SALVATION 

guilty to the innocent, and merit from the good to the 
bad ; the idea that there can be with God any such thing 
as substitution of person for person in the field of right- 
eousness ; — all these, which are companions to the idea of 
God influencing himself, are affected by the central fault 
of unreality. It may be unnoticed long, but it will be seen 
at length. The fact seems to be that if we wish to hold 
a doctrine that is real, we must choose between the two 
directions for the action in the work of Christ; we can- 
not combine them. There may be action that takes effect 
on God to influence him, but we may be sure that it origi- 
nates somewhere else than in God himself ; and there may 
be action that originates in God, but we may be sure that 
it takes effect upon some other. God does not influence 
himself. 

If we choose, or judge, between these two directions 
there can be no doubt as to the result. In the work of 
Christ, was God the actor, or was God acted upon? for 
we are at war with reality if we attempt to affirm both. 
We cannot hesitate about our answer. God was the actor. 
This indeed is the first thing that we know. This is what 
makes the gospel divine. God was in Christ reconciling 
the world to himself. The gospel is the power of God 
unto salvation. God spared not his own son, but delivered 
him up for us all, and will with him also freely give us 
all things, thus completing the work that was his own 
throughout. In spirit and motive, in will and exertion, the 
work of Christ is God's own work, in which God himself 
is active. If this element were taken away, the work of 
Christ for us would vanish. This alone gives it signifi- 
cance and power. The satisfaction theories have held 
firmly that all was from God, and therein they have been 
right; but they have tried to hold also that this work 
which God was doing took effect upon God himself to 
influence him, and herein they have introduced unreality 
and confusion. God was the actor in the work of Christ, 

57 



IMMORTALITY: A STUDY OF BELIEF 

but his action moved outward from himself, not around 
and inward toward himself again. 

Upon whom then did God act? Out from him the 
action came, but whither was it directed? Not toward 
Satan, as men once supposed, and not toward the world 
that might misunderstand his grace, but, simply and 
straightforwardly, toward us men whom he desired to 
save. God acted toward men, the sinful, to accomplish 
for them what was in his heart. There was no other 
straightforward direction for the movement to take, and 
this direction it did take. In Christ God moved upon the 
world to save it. 

And what was the action ? The action was self-expres- 
sion on the part of God. Christ appeared in time, on the 
plane of human life, within human limitations and within 
the reach of human acquaintance, to show what God 
eternally is. In Christ God made revelation of his eternal 
Saviourhood. What Christ did represented what goes on 
eternally in God. In Christ God gave sinful men to know 
that in having to do with him they had to do with a God 
like Christ, who cherishes an infinite hatred of their sin, 
and is doing all that needs to be done, except what they 
themselves must do, to deliver them from it. 

When we hear about the divinity of Christ we spring 
at once to the adoring affirmation that Christ is like God ; 
whereas, if we are to get any revelation out of it, we must 
adoringly learn that God is like Christ. Have we not 
been told so? "He that hath seen me hath seen the 
Father." In Christ God makes self -revelation, and 
enables us to know that what we find true of Christ in 
life and death is true of him also. To make this plain, 
and to win for this truth its appropriate power with men, 
God sent his son into the world, and Jesus lived and died 
and rose again. 

Is this a doctrine that we need no Saviour ? No ; it 
is the doctrine that we do need a Saviour, and should 

58 



WORK OF CHRIST FOR OUR SALVATION 

perish if we had not one ; but it is the doctrine also that 
we have a Saviour now and ever, and that our Saviour is 
God. God is out of sight, and human ignorance of him 
is deepened by sin, so that men are more than ignorant, 
they are wrong, profoundly misjudging him whom it is 
life for them to know. The fact is, though concealed by 
God's invisibility and worse than unknown through sin, 
that God is the redemptive Being. He is the lover of 
holiness, the hater of sin and the Father of souls, whose 
nature it is to do all that needs to be done, apart from 
their own action, for the spiritual redemption and salva- 
tion of his creatures. It is his nature to love, to bear, to 
wait, to work, to chasten, to restore, to be gracious and 
severe, to be righteous, patient, firm, long-suffering, in the 
long endeavor to save. He is unseen, and men are mis- 
judging him, but this is what he really is. God is 
Saviour. Of course then such a God cannot be content 
without making himself known as Saviour ; and in Christ 
he gives his eternal Saviourhood temporal expression. 
He gives Christ to be the Saviour of the world ; but if we 
imagined that Christ was a Saviour apart from God, or 
as anything else than the expression of God's Saviour- 
hood, how quickly would Christ rebuke us for the 
thought ! Christ is the messenger and revelation of God's 
own Saviourhood. What is revealed in Christ is that 
God is a holy God and a Saviour ; most especially that he 
is for us a Saviour, and is all the Saviour that we need. 
All that we behold in Christ, — all the holiness, the love, 
the sin-bearing, the seeking of the lost, the untiring en- 
deavor, the severity, the patience, the unselfish devotion 
to our good, — is shown us as an expression of what 
exists in God himself. If there is anything in Christ that 
condemns our sin and breaks our hearts and wins our 
souls to penitence, it all exists in God, and from him 
the appeal all comes. If we see Christ doing all for our 
salvation, that means that God is doing all for our salva- 

59 



IMMORTALITY: A STUDY OF BELIEF 

tion. God himself is our sin-bearer and Saviour, and 
Christ is his exhibition of himself. And if we ask what 
is the ground of God's merciful dealing with sinful men, 
the sending of his son to the world is the undying proof 
and testimony that God has in himself the ground of his 
merciful dealing with sinful men, and needs no other 
ground. The cross of Christ gives proclamation of the 
infinite mercy of God, and of the sufficiency of the divine 
Saviourhood. 

This is an action of God against which no charge of 
unreality can hold. Christ is the real expression of the 
real God, for the realization of that gracious purpose 
which his nature inspires. This action is not indirect, 
circuitous, artificial, but is directly aimed at its real ob- 
ject. It is vital, expressing God himself to man himself. 
It involves no fictions or falsities. Unrealities will not 
naturally gather round it. It is worthy of God, and 
worthy of man. When the doctrine of a holy Saviour- 
God revealed in Christ is held as a vital reality by a 
church of holy saviour-men, the gospel of Christ in this 
form will surely prove itself the power of God unto salva- 
tion. 

A little catechism may close this article. 

What is the ground of our salvation? 

The ground of our salvation is God, who is the infinite 
redemptive goodness, — a Being perfectly good in himself, 
whose nature it is to be drawing us to goodness also. 

Why is our sin so terrible a thing f 

Our sin is so terrible a thing because it is sin against 
this infinite redemptive goodness, with which we ought to 
be at one, and because it blinds us to him, and keeps us 
away from him, and makes us opposers instead of helpers 
to his redemptive work. 

What needs to be done in order that we may be saved? 

Since God is God, nothing needs to be done to him in 
order that we may be saved; but we must answer his 

60 



WORK OF CHRIST FOR OUR SALVATION 

redemptive goodness with our penitence and faith and 
love, and let him have his way with us in bringing us out 
of sin to himself. 

What has Christ done for us? 

Christ has shown us the Father. He has revealed the 
infinite redeeming love of the holy God, and has thus 
opened the way for us to believe in God our Saviour and 
be saved by his grace. 

Of what use is Christ to us at present f 

Christ is still the expression of God to us, and he is 
our way to God. From him we learn what God is like, 
and by living in fellowship with him, who is our tender 
human brother, we live in fellowship with God. 

What is the Holy Spirit f 

The Holy Spirit is God as he dwells in us to accom- 
plish in us that work of redemptive goodness for which 
he prepared the way in the life and death of Christ. 

May the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of 
God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit, be with us 
all. 



6i 



HUXLEY AND PHILLIPS BROOKS* 

The last months of the nineteenth century witnessed 
the publication of two great biographies : "The Life and 
Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley," by Leonard Huxley, 
his son, and "The Life of Phillips Brooks," by Professor 
Allen. No two biographies could more fitly have seen the 
light just as the old century was expiring. They are great 
in themselves, rich in material, sympathetic and strong 
in execution, worthy of their subjects ; and they are great 
in significance, as representative of great movements and 
tendencies in the century that is past. Each of the two 
men was a leader of vast effectiveness, picturesque as well 
as strong, who left a powerful impress upon his time, and 
each stands for a view of life that is today of the first im- 
portance. Taken together, the two biographies bring out 
in the acutest form the great religious contrast and ques- 
tion of the present age. I can propose nothing more help- 
ful than a study of these men as their biographies present 
them, and of some of the sharp issues that are raised by 
the twofold story. It is true that I am not competent to 
discuss the two men in view of all that they have done. 
Only a skilled scientist could do justice to Huxley, and 
only a great master in religion to Brooks. If I Hmit my- 
self to the biographies and what they suggest, even thus 
the field is far too large for the time at my disposal. But 
let me do what I can toward setting before you the men 
and their meaning, 

* An address delivered before the Oberlin Theological Semi- 
nary, and before the Alumni of Colgate University, in 1901. Pub- 
lished in The Bihliotheca Sacra, 1901, and by H. R. Allenson, 
London, 1903. 

62 



HUXLEY AND PHILLIPS BROOKS 

Very impressive are the two men as a pair of prominent 
figures in their century. Huxley was born in 1825, Brooks 
in 1835. Huxley's first large work was done in the fifties, 
Brooks's in the sixties. Brooks died in 1893, Huxley in 
1895. Both were intense and furious workers, laboring to 
the uttermost, and the two broke in health at about the 
same age; Brooks dying at once, however, while Huxley 
lingered for years in comparative feebleness. Their activ- 
ity covered the period of greatest transformation in the 
nineteenth century. On two continents of the world, in 
two continents of thought, the two men labored simulta- 
neously, in the thick of the time when new things were 
pressing in to be known and estimated and life was find- 
ing new significance. They met more than once — in Lon- 
don — once as guests of James Russell Lowell. Huxley 
talked, but Brooks was silent. The meeting was pleasant, 
but no special contact was established between the two. 
Perhaps Brooks could have understood Huxley better 
than Huxley could have understood Brooks, but the two 
men stood apart, each a prominent figure in his own 
world of thought and life. Each looked into the other's 
world, as he must, and dealt with questions thence aris- 
ing, in what manner we shall see ; but neither ever really 
lived in the world of the other. 

Huxley was born for science. His father was a teacher, 
though not a remarkably intelligent man, or specially help- 
ful to the son. His mother was a keen, clear-sighted 
woman, quick and strong in her intellectual processes. As 
for early education, he came under no systematic educa- 
tional influence whatever, until he entered upon the study 
of medicine. This he did at the age of seventeen, and now 
he met his first good teacher. He was precocious : he had 
already been keenly interested in metaphysical questions, 
had taught himself something of two or three languages, 
and had begun to think of science. From sheer want of 
company he did his own thinking ; but probably he would 

63 



IMMORTALITY: A STUDY OF BELIEF 

have done that in any case, for his mind was his own from 
the first, and he was as bold as he was insatiable. Before 
he had quite reached his medical degree, at the age of 
twenty-one, he found the way into the work for which he 
was born. Like Darwin, he began his real career on a 
British government vessel, fitted out for a long cruise in 
the interests of science. The subjects to be explored were 
Geography, Geology, and Natural History; and in the 
waters of the antipodes, about Australia and New Guinea, 
he spent four years of close work, amid the infinite abun- 
dance of tropical life, engaged in careful observation and 
record-making. In this labor he struck the keynote of his 
life — observation strict and searching, and honest inter- 
pretation following it. Long afterward some amateur 
critic in natural science ventured into newspaper discus- 
sion with Huxley, and, after doing what he could, but far 
less than he thought he was doing, sarcastically inquired 
what he should do in order to understand the subject 
better. "Get a cockroach and dissect it," was Huxley's 
unsympathetic answer. Work, investigation, examination 
of facts, careful, patient, thorough, candid, without pre- 
suppositions, intended to discover the very thing that is 
and set it in its true place among other things that are: 
this was the aim of the man from youth to age, and to 
this his life was wholly and unswervingly devoted. 

In Australia he lost his heart, and found his life ; and 
after his return to England the burning question for some 
time was whether science would support a family. 
Science was very slow in welcoming this new devotee, but 
at length he found his work. It was no one thing at first, 
and it was never any one thing, in exclusive fashion, but 
it was physical science always, physical science and what 
it suggested. Lecturing, writing, care and reorganization 
of a great museum, administering scientific societies, serv- 
ing on public scientific comimissions, popular scientific 
education, introduction of sound methods in place of un- 

64 



HUXLEY AND PHILLIPS BROOKS 

sound, lending a hand to every progressive movement, 
battling what he judged to be false and standing up for 
truth and righteousness as he saw it — such activities as 
these, with constant laboratory w^ork, investigation, dis- 
covery, classification, verification, proof, and defense of 
conclusions, occupied his head and heart and hands 
through years of uttermost industry, and conveyed his 
contribution to his age. At thirty years old he questioned 
himself thus : "To smite all humbugs, however big ; to 
give a nobler tone to science; to set an example of absti- 
nence from petty personal controversies, and of toleration 
for everything but lying; to be indifferent as to whether 
the work is recognized as mine or not, so long as it is 
done — are these my aims?" One who follows through 
the work pf his life will feel that Huxley was not un- 
faithful to this vision of high character and worthy work. 
He had a genius for unity, and was always putting this 
and that together. What first made him known among 
scientists was the discovery of certain homologies in the 
living world, where only difference had been discerned be- 
fore. This was an unforeseen result of his years of labor 
in the comparatively unknown life of southern seas. He 
was a born classifier, and a habitual discoverer for lost 
things of their place in nature. Hence he was ready for 
Darwin's announcement of proof for the evolutionary 
method in the world; and though he never perfectly 
agreed with Darwin, he was from the very beginning a 
bold and formidable advocate of that unity in the uni- 
verse which is covered by the name evolution. Darwin 
could not fight, but Huxley could, and did : he fought the 
battles of the doctrine everywhere, and some of the battle- 
scenes were highly dramatic. The second great book on 
the subject, next after Darwin's "Origin of Species," was 
Huxley's "Evidences as to Man's Place in Nature." He 
bore the reproach of the new doctrine, and assisted in its 
victory. 

6s 



IMMORTALITY: A STUDY OF BELIEF 

The personal characteristics of the man are not merely 
essential to his biography, they constitute a vital part of 
his scientific attitude. No man was ever more steadily 
himself. Huxley was the same, from his first days in 
science to his last. He appears in the biography as a man 
of sturdy will, of cheerful temperament, of sparkling wit 
and various humor, of warm afifections, of broad interests. 
Mr. John Fiske has told us, in the Atlantic Monthly, how 
extraordinarily lovable he was, especially in the delightful 
atmosphere of his home. As to his intellectual attitude, 
it was simply and steadily that of an honest man. The 
greatest virtue in his esteem was truthfulness, and all 
shams were objects of his hatred and indignation. An 
honest opponent he never failed to respect, but a shifty 
one called down his wrath. There were great men whom 
he never forgave the sin of shiftiness in argument, of 
which he believed them guilty. Most honestly did he 
apply his honesty to himself. No work for him but care- 
ful work: no superficial examinations, no hasty infer- 
ences, no method but the strictest method. No presuppo- 
sitions as to what an examination is to reveal. A scientist, 
he said, has no a priori assumptions, and would as will- 
ingly come to one conclusion as to another, the facts being 
decisive. "Science," he said, "seems to me to teach in the 
highest and strongest manner the great truth which is 
embodied in the Christian conception of entire surrender 
to the will of God. Sit down before fact as a little child, 
be prepared to give up every preconceived notion, follow 
humbly whatever and to whatever abysses nature leads, 
or you shall learn nothing. I have only begun to learn 
content and peace of mind since I have resolved at all 
risks to do this." Accordingly with him it was a part of 
personal honor that the unexamined should be regarded 
as the unknown, and the unproven should be the unac- 
cepted. His kind of proof, also, was the demonstrative 
and exact ; where he could not obtain this he had no con- 

66 



HUXLEY AND PHILLIPS BROOKS 

elusions, — all waited for light. A generalization on too 
narrow a basis of facts was a sin when it was made in the 
face of light, and a thing to be avoided as sin in all cases. 
Probably a more honest scientist never faced a laboratory- 
table. His moral sense entered too into his theory of life 
in general. He was a firm believer in morals as the high- 
est human interest. He respected sincerity, and never 
tried to influence young students away from their sincere 
religious beliefs. He advocated the reading of the Bible 
in the schools of London when he was a member of the 
school board, on the ground that the Bible was the great 
moral educator of the people who were concerned, and 
morality, he said, is the matter first to be considered. 

The story of Huxley's agnosticism is simply the story 
of his honesty. To his own great loss, "not proven" was 
his verdict concerning God and the soul, eternity and reli- 
gion. To him, of course, not proven meant not available. 
He tells the origin of the word "agnostic," of which he 
was the inventor. In the Metaphysical Society, of Lon- 
don, he encountered men of all sorts of belief, who 
seemed to him to have this one thing in common, that 
they thought the problem of existence had been solved. 
It is true that they were by no means agreed as to what 
the right solution was, but each man thought that there 
was one : each had his gnosis, his theory, his interpreta- 
tion of the universal mystery. Huxley had none, and 
could not discover that there was one to be had ; and so, 
over against these gnostics, or knowers, he called himself 
an agnostic, or one who does not know the universal 
meaning or expect that it will be known. The name was 
not a confession of universal ignorance, or a declaration 
that nothing can be known, as some have professed to 
understand it, for no one ever believed more thoroughly 
than Huxley in the attainableness of sound knowledge. It 
denoted simply his consistent refusal to affirm the undem- 
onstrated, applied in the realm of God and religion. With 

67 



IMMORTALITY: A STUDY OF BELIEF 

him it was a word of honesty, which described him as he 
was, and as with his views of evidence he had to be. It 
makes a profoundly pathetic story, this story of life 
within the limits that were prescribed by his agnosticism 
— limits that he could not pass, and yet across which his 
normal soul would sometimes look, not without longing. 
Of this I shall speak again. It is touching to remember, 
though we decline to read into it meanings larger than he 
meant, that upon his tombstone there were inscribed, by 
his own direction, three lines from a poem written by his 
wife, 

Be not afraid, ye waiting hearts that weep; 
For still He giveth His beloved sleep, 
And if an endless sleep He wills, so best, 

and that the He is written with a capital. 

As Huxley was born for science, so one may say that 
PhilHps Brooks was born for religion. His ancestry led 
that way. The Brookses were practical people of the com- 
mon life, strong in sound morals and by no means unre- 
ligious. The Phillipses were more highly educated peo- 
ple, given to the professions, enterprising in church and 
state, serious, vigorous, religious. Phillips Brooks's 
mother was one of the most religious of the religious — 
intense, conscientious, self-sacrificing, rapturous. All her 
maternity, which was of the most eager and self -lavishing 
kind, and all her religiousness, blended into a single pas- 
sion toward her children. Few men have ever known 
such mother-love as embraced this son, so long as his 
mother lived. A high-minded, sensible father and a high- 
souled, fervent mother gave him birth. 

Unlike Huxley, Phillips Brooks received the best edu- 
cation that his environment afforded. He was not preco- 
cious. He passed through Harvard without doing won- 
ders. He v/ould have chosen to be a teacher, but an 
ill-starred experience turned him aside from that. It was 
by unforeseen ways that he was led into that work apart 

68 



HUXLEY AND PHILLIPS BROOKS 

from which he would never have been himself. Under an 
impulse that was an unconscious ripening of all the past, 
he found himself in a small theological seminary, where 
there was one inspiring teacher, and scarcely any other 
inspiring thing. In the three years that he spent there his 
first conscious and well-directed work was done. The 
seminary was so little absorbing that he took his own way, 
and it was the way of reading. His reading was enor- 
mous in amount and very wide in range. He sought to 
lay hold upon the best that the human mind has done, and 
to make it his own. 

Here his ideal was unlike Huxley's. Huxley once 
wrote: "The student to whose wants the mediseval uni- 
versity was adjusted looked to the past and sought book- 
learning, while the modern looks to the future and seeks 
the knowledge of things. . . . The modern knows that the 
only source of real knowledge lies in the application of 
scientific methods to the ascertainment of the facts of 
existence ; that the unascertained is infinitely greater than 
the ascertained, and that the chief business is not so much 
to make scholars as to train pioneers." So Huxley 
thought that what man has done may well be neglected 
in favor of what man may do. For past achievements he 
cared little, save as they were either warnings or guides 
for present use. Brooks, however, turned with all the 
strength of his being to the study of man and what man 
has done. His field was the human. Human interest was 
the very stuff of which his life was made, and it was by 
human interest that his studies were dominated. It was 
on topics of conspicuous human interest that he read so 
insatiably, and in his reading he was seeking to appro- 
priate the worthiest product of human thought. He 
read, he considered, he weighed, he sought for insight, 
he endeavored to think justly the great thoughts of hu- 
manity, and to learn to do justice to humanity in his 
thoughts. 

69 



IMMORTALITY: A STUDY OF BELIEF 

This was the key to the life of Phillips Brooks, — he was 
a student of man, and a servant of man. Whatever any- 
one else might choose as a field of thought and effort, he 
was the man of humanity. To know and understand the 
human, to know existence in the light of human relations, 
to serve mankind by ministering to it the good that it 
needs in the higher ranges of its life, — ^these were his 
aims and choices, this was his consecration. His early 
reading lay in the field of life, and his reflections, of 
which he made constant record from first to last, were 
reflections upon life and the soul. He was not indifferent 
to the world of science, but in the world of philosophy 
he was somewhat more at home, and in life itself most of 
all. This preparatory work was a true preliminary to his 
career in the Christian ministry, where for a third of a 
century he served mankind as a minister of Jesus Christ. 

The work of Brooks was done in two cities, Philadel- 
phia and Boston. Only in cities could he have worked, 
for he was a city man, to whom the city was indispensa- 
ble. He could not long be content in the country : he must 
be in the rush of men. Nature was circumference, man 
was center. In his travels, architecture was more to him 
than mountains : human use appealed to him as inanimate 
grandeur could not. He lived in a crowd, he held him- 
self at the service of men, he was incomparably accessible 
to such as he could help, he gave himself without reserve, 
he poured out vitality without stint wherever he felt that 
men had need of him. In his two homes his human inter- 
est took two forms. In Philadelphia he took part in every 
human interest that came appealing. He was an active 
reformer. Into the defense of the nation in the Civil War 
he threw the whole force of his being. He gave his wit- 
ness against slavery, and gloried when it was no more. He 
braved unpopularity to secure rights for negroes in street 
cars. He helped all sorts of local reforms. But in Boston 
he withdrew as rapidly as he could from outside reforma- 

70 



HUXLEY AND PHILLIPS BROOKS 

tory activities, and devoted himself wholly to religious in- 
terests. Still it was all for man, but now it was for man 
in the spirit, man in the life of the soul, man in religion. 
To quicken and deepen the life of men with God, and to 
suffuse all human existence with the glow of the glory of 
God in Christ, this was now his sole aim, held with in- 
creasing singleness as the years went by. Thus he moved 
toward a climax. Up to the highest life of man his zeal 
and consecration moved, until in his ripest years he was 
pouring himself out in splendid sacrifice for the helping 
of the human in its fellowship with the divine. By the 
same action he was the servant of man and of God. 

This was no abnormal movement of human interest; 
rather is all human interest that stops short of this incom- 
plete. This is the right human interest, the interest that 
discerns the soul of man, and seeks to find a place for the 
soul in the order of existence. Man is a spirit, and the 
demands of his spiritual life are not only the supreme de- 
mands of his existence, but the most immediate and 
urgent also. What shall it profit a man if he gain the 
whole world but lose his own soul ? if he win everything 
below, but lose his way in the higher realms of the spirit, 
and find no success or welfare for his own highest part ? 
To care aright for man is to care for him in this region. 
When I said that Brooks's field was the human, I meant 
that it was the true human, the human in its highest life 
and fellowship. It was the field of man with God, and 
God with man. For the two fields of God and man, if 
such they seem, are one. Human interest is divine inter- 
est too. The problems of God and the soul arise together, 
and are solved together, if either be solved at all. The 
very reality of the soul and the reality of God are dis- 
cerned together if they are discerned in power. All 
reconciling and restful thought must deal with both, and 
all deep satisfaction for man must be found in the knowl- 
edge both of the soul and of its God. 

71 



IMMORTALITY: A STUDY OF BELIEF 

Huxley was not indifferent to that aspect or department 
of life in which men of religion have believed that they 
had found God. No man can be permanently indifferent 
to it if he really thinks, or if he feelingly encounters the 
great experiences of life. Least of all could this aspect of 
existence pass unnoticed by such a man as Huxley — a 
man so far-searching in intellectual interest, so honest in 
thought and warm in affection, and so in love with knowl- 
edge. He encountered the great experiences : he well 
knew struggle and weakness, love and loss, limitation and 
desire. Through family ties he was bound more closely 
than Brooks to the common human lot. Grief forced 
upon him the questions of the soul, and experience kept 
the significance of life before him. 

He cared sincerely for these things, and yet in the 
region where rise the questions of God and the soul Hux- 
ley had neither enthusiastic beliefs nor even accepted 
certainties. He had his firm and enthusiastic moral con- 
victions, but in what is known as the field of religion he 
was blank. This is no accusation from without, it is what 
he always said. It was just here that he was agnostic. 
The sudden death at four years old of his first child 
brought him a letter of sympathy and religious suggestion 
from Charles Kingsley ; and in reply to this he gave utter- 
ance to his innermost heart as he had told it to no one but 
his wife. This letter of Huxley, with one or two later 
ones addressed to the same friend, has been much quoted 
since the biography appeared. These are letters of a 
genuine agnostic, as the word was by himself defined — 
of one who does not imagine that any key to the meaning 
of existence is in his hand or within his reach. Whether 
there is in the universe a substratum of being, distinct 
from phenomena, corresponding to what men mean when 
they speak of God, he regards as a question concerning 
which absolutely no convincing evidence exists. He is 
not a willful rejecter of God, but an unconvinced inquirer 

72 



HUXLEY AND PHILLIPS BROOKS 

about him. "I have never had the least sympathy," he 
says, "with the a priori reasons against orthodoxy, and I 
have by nature and disposition the greatest possible antip- 
athy to all the atheistic and infidel school. Nevertheless 
I know that I am, in spite of myself, exactly what the 
Christian world call, and so far as I can see are justified 
in calling, atheist and infidel." The order of the world 
is rational, and observation and experience have assured 
him that it is characterized by strict and certain justice : 
sin gravitates to sorrow, and righteousness to welfare. 
Yet the rationality and righteousness which he so pro- 
foundly feels to be present in the world he does not feel 
himself justified in attributing to a personal rational and 
righteous One. That there is personal quality at all in 
the administration of the world, he considers absolutely 
undemonstrable. That there is a Father invisible, loving 
men and helping them in spirit, of course he does not see. 
That the administration of the world, if such it can be 
called, knows anything of love, or is touched with tender- 
ness, or takes any notice of human beings in the stress of 
their troubles or the perils of their career, he sees no evi- 
dence and can obtain no conviction. As to the immor- 
tality of man, there are no means of disproving it, but 
neither is there any reason for believing it. That we 
desire immortality is to him less than no proof that we 
have it ; it should rather be a warning against believing in 
immortality because we wish it to be true, a course which 
a scientist's judgment and conscience will not allow to 
him. Of ethical appeal on the ground of immortality 
with its rewards and punishment, he feels no need, having 
ethical forces enough in the present life to govern him in 
good living. Of the existence of a soul in man, as some- 
thing diflferent from the bodily life and capable of persist- 
ing after death, he knows nothing : his own personality in 
such conditions he is unable to conceive. Thus he is 
wholly, honestly, and consistently agnostic as to those 

73 



IMMORTALITY: A STUDY OF BELIEF 

matters on which men of religion, Uke his correspondent 
Kingsley, make strong affirmations. He truly does not 
know, and he will maintain his integrity against all influ- 
ences, and not lie by saying that he knows. Grief over 
his dead child shall not break his purpose to affirm only 
what he is sure of. He would believe in immortality if he 
had evidence of it, but without evidence what is a man to 
do? Nevertheless he is no materialist. "My fundamen- 
tal axiom of speculative philosophy is that materialism 
and spiritualism are opposite poles of the same absurdity 
— the absurdity of imagining that we know anything 
about either spirit or matter." And in all this he says that 
he is not alone. "Understand that all the younger men of 
science whom I know are essentially of my way of think- 
ing. I know not a scoffer or an irreligious or an immoral 
man among them, but they all regard orthodoxy as you do 
Brahmanism." 

Thus a great realm of human experience was to Hux- 
ley absolutely a blank. He did not despise it, or argue 
against it, or condemn it as worthless : he simply could 
not find it. In his judgment there was no standing- 
ground for such experience. It was a nonexistent world, 
and a world with no prospect of attaining to legitimate 
existence. 

Here breaks upon us the full contrast between the two 
men whom we are placing in comparison. In the realm 
that to Huxley was nonexistent for want of evidence. 
Brooks lived and moved and had his being. Turn to that 
■world for a moment, and hear the voice of one who finds 
it most real, and dwells at home in its spiritual atmos- 
phere. Quotation is the quickest way to show what Phil- 
lips Brooks found there : " T knew all about God before 
you told me,' said little blind, deaf, dumb Helen Keller to 
me one day, 'only I did not know his name.' It was a 
perfect expression of the innateness of the divine idea in 
the human mind, of the belonging of the human soul to 

74 



HUXLEY AND PHILLIPS BROOKS 

God." Of religion he says: "It comes directly from the 
soul of God laid immediately upon and pressing itself into 
the soul of every one of his children. It is the gift of the 
total nature of God to the total nature of man. There- 
fore it can utter itself only through the total human life, 
which is the personal life." In a more personal strain, 
speaking of his own experience, he says again : "Less and 
less, I think, grows the consciousness of seeking God. 
Greater and greater grows the certainty that he is seeking 
us and giving himself to us to the complete measure of 
our present capacity. That is love, not that we loved 
him, but that he loved us. . . . There is such a thing as 
putting ourselves in the way of God's overflowing love 
and letting it break upon us till the response of love 
comes, not by struggle, not even by deliberation, but by 
necessity, as the echo comes when the sound strikes the 
rock." What language is this, for affirmation of infinite 
but tangible realities discovered in that world which Hux- 
ley found blank and bare ! 

I do not know that these are the best passages to quote 
for illustration of Brooks's mind concerning religion. 
Very likely they are not, for there are hundreds more to 
the same effect ; but I wanted only a little sample out of 
the abundance. In this region moved year after year the 
thought and utterance of the man, and the action of his 
life. He lived in religion. There he found a splendid 
freedom, and his ample powers struck out in generous 
activity. He did not look into religion and into God as 
a bird may look from its nest into the open sky. He rose 
into religion and into God, and was there sustained. To 
him God was the greatest and most certain of realities. 
Christ has revealed God, and shown what manner of 
God he is, and to this man Christ stood for God : Christ 
in the infinite beauty and power of his character meant 
the meaning of God to him. God meant Christ, and 
Christ meant God ; and under either name he had before 

75 



IMMORTALITY: A STUDY OF BELIEF 

him the reality which he felt to be the glory of this world 
and of all worlds. Accordingly his keywords were such 
as God, Christ, the soul, personality, love, life. The key- 
word of his later ministry was life. In those glorious 
years of spiritual power he used to say that he had only 
one text and one sermon, and the one text was, "I am 
come that they might have life, and have it more abun- 
dantly." The soul's experience of inexhaustible, over- 
flowing life in fellowship with the living God, this was 
his one theme, and this experience he helped multitudes 
to make their own. 

What a contrast is this ! — one man living a full and 
glorious life in the realm of religion, and the other abso- 
lutely without evidence that such a realm exists. One 
spirit strikes out successfully for flight upon a strong sus- 
taining air, where the calculations of the other show noth- 
ing stronger than a vacuum. When such a contrast as 
this appears, we are compelled to say that one of the two 
men must have been right, and the other wrong. One 
may have been acting in accordance with truth, that is, 
with things as they are, but both cannot. Only one can 
have been justified in his position by the essential realities 
of existence. There was an element for the real support 
of Brooks's life in the spirit, or there was not. Huxley 
said there was not. Brooks said there was. If Brooks 
was right, Huxley was sufifering limitations that robbed 
him of his birthright. If Huxley was right. Brooks, by 
all sound reason, was impossible. There is no need of 
affirming atheism and materialism out and out, in order 
to render Brooks and his life impossible. Such agnos- 
ticism as Huxley's will answer just as well. If one can- 
not legitimately affirm anything concerning the reality of 
God, the soul, and the eternal life, then the satisfaction, 
enthusiasm, exultation of Brooks in view of them was 
plainly quite unjustified, and can never be worthily enter- 
tained by a right-thinking man. If all men thought as 

76 



HUXLEY AND PHILLIPS BROOKS 

Huxley thought, no man could ever live as Brooks lived. 
This Huxley knew. Brooks's faith had room for the 
science which was Huxley's life, but Huxley's agnosti- 
cism would utterly paralyze the religious action in which 
Brooks had his very being. Religion is real in one view 
of the case, and impossible in the other. 

I have encountered this great practical question in read- 
ing the two biographies. It has come before me as a 
question of life and death. To me, I am not ashamed to 
say, a world without religion would be a world of death. 
You may call me too timid if you will, and remind me that 
I am shrinking from a condition that some men of excel- 
lent motives have not considered terrible at all. But I 
cannot help it. It is with a horror of great darkness that 
I think of a world in which the paralysis of an accepted 
agnosticism has fallen upon the religious energies of man- 
kind. I have asked myself what it would be to try to live 
the life of religion in Huxley's world, and I have been 
impressed by the impossibility of even the attempt. I 
have looked upon the noble figure of Phillips Brooks as 
he moved among men, radiating a holy light and warmth 
on every side, nourishing the worthiest vitality of his 
generation by influence and example, and doing all this by 
himself living a life of strong endeavor and rich peace in 
fellowship with the God whom Jesus Christ made known 
to him ; and I have asked myself what manner of world 
this would be to live in, if such a life were absolutely 
without just ground of being. It is very true that an 
honest man desires to see things as they are, and that if 
the real world is constructed hopelessly inhospitable to 
religion it is well that we all should know it, that we may 
school ourselves down to it. Nevertheless it was the 
shadow of the great darkness that I saw in reading the 
Life of Huxley, honest, fascinating and useful though 
Huxley was; and I rejoiced in the returning of the glad- 
some light when I turned from one biography to the 

77 



IMMORTALITY: A STUDY OF BELIEF 

other, and beheld Phillips Brooks living in Gk)d with the 
strength of a strong man and the freedom of an immortal 
spirit. The contrast of light and darkness that I beheld 
is the contrast of our age, and the question is the question 
of today. Was Huxley living without his birthright, or 
had Brooks no right to be ? 

On the face of it, it seems a rather serious indictment 
of a view of life that it would render Phillips Brooks im- 
possible. If someone proposed a view of life according 
to which there was no legitimate place for the existence 
of science, or of Huxley as a man of science, we should 
look him twice in the face before we were sure that he 
was serious. We should say at once that there is some- 
thing lacking in a view of life that makes no room for 
Huxley. But Brooks, it seems, may be out of the ques- 
tion. A view of life may be calmly maintained as the 
only tenable one, according to which such living as his is 
condemned as no part of true and well-grounded human 
living. It is not as if this view of life merely corrected 
errors in religion, simplified it, or offered it a better life. 
No, it is religion itself that must go, not only in the case 
of Brooks but in all his kind; not only religious life in 
poorer and darker minds, where ignorance and supersti- 
tion reign, but religious life in the largest minds and the 
purest hearts — in Kingsley, to whom Huxley wrote, in 
Tennyson, in Cromwell, in Pascal, in Luther, in Paul, in 
Augustine, in Jesus Christ himself. Huxley was clear- 
eyed enough to see this. He calls attention to "the im- 
passable gulf between the anthropomorphism, however 
refined, of theology, and the passionless impersonality of 
the unknown and unknowable which science shows every- 
where underlying the thin veil of phenomena." To sub- 
stitute for God the passionless impersonality of the un- 
known and unknowable is to abolish the religious life, and 
render impossible such men as Phillips Brooks. This, I 
say, seems on the face of it a rather severe indictment of 

78 



HUXLEY AND PHILLIPS BROOKS 

a view of life. Religion is a large element to be blotted 
out as illegitimate. It certainly seems more probable that 
Huxley was living without his birthright, than that 
Brooks and all his kind are really and properly impos- 
sible. 

So deep and radical a contrast must have had its causes 
in the two men. Can we find them ? Can these two views 
of life held by Brooks and Huxley be accounted for in 
them? Yes. There is no difficulty, I think, in perceiv- 
ing how they came to be held. Various causes may have 
contributed, but not many need to be called in. Of the 
two men before us, one was a student of man, while the 
other was a student of life below man. One found his 
data, his method, and his idea of evidence in the human 
world, the personal realm, the region of the spirit; the 
other, in the inf rahuman world, the impersonal realm, the 
region of physical existence. Each lived in his own world 
and followed its ways ; hence there came wide difference 
in their conceptions concerning man and what there may 
be above him. The explanation, I need not say, is of the 
deepest interest to us all, because the same two worlds are 
still oflfering their suggestions, and judgment between 
them has constantly to be passed. 

We have seen Huxley devoting himself simply, hon- 
estly, and conscientiously, to physical science. He was a 
naturalist, a biologist, a palaeontologist, an explorer of the 
living world past and present. His method was the strict- 
est. Loose work he abhorred; evidence must stand the 
closest physical testing ; inferences must wait for precision 
in the data. Although he looked reverently and obedi- 
ently upon nature as the sum of decisive facts, still it was 
true that he looked down upon his field. He had to look 
down upon it, for it was below him. Nowhere within it 
did personality exist, or personal relations require to be 
considered. Mental activity in human ranges was not 
included within the matters that came before him. He 

79 



IMMORTALITY: A STUDY OF BELIEF 

was interested in tracing the evolution of mind in the 
animal world, and so far as his scientific studies led him 
to consider mind in man, it was by this avenue, from be- 
low, that he approached it. It was through exact exami- 
nation of life below man that Huxley's methods were 
developed and his tendencies of thought were established. 
Nay, his work was mainly upon the lower forms of the 
life that is inferior to man; and it was wrought largely 
by examination of creatures dead. It was a dissected 
cockroach that was to give light to the correspondent who 
sat in darkness. Give light it could, of course, but only 
so far as a dissected cockroach can be illuminant — and 
there might be regions which it could not sufficiently light 
up. Without early training or predisposition of the reli- 
gious kind, Huxley came into practice of close investiga- 
tion, in the realm of existence that contains no developed 
personality and suggests no personal relations. The re- 
sult, in his thinking, corresponded to the conditions. It is 
true that as for himself, Hving in the world of men, of 
course he knew what men know by experience of actual 
meanings, and lived in love, purity, and fidelity according 
to worthy human standards. But when he speculated 
upon the meaning of existence, the limitations of his 
method and his world were upon him. That man was to 
be estimated in the same manner as the world below him 
seemed to him both natural and necessary. The analogies 
of the lower world came up to govern his thoughts about 
the human. 

In ethics, it is true, he came to another thought, and it 
is interesting to wonder what might have happened if he 
had lived long enough to be led to another step in the 
same direction. Concerning the practical relations of men 
among themselves, he perceived that man is not altogether 
like his inferiors ; and in the famous Romanes Lecture of 
1893 he maintained that the self-regarding method which 
made animal evolution successful was not adapted to ren- 

80 



HUXLEY AND PHILLIPS BROOKS 

der human life successful. If only he had followed out 
this hint ! But in what we call the spiritual relations of 
man he never found anything certified to him by the 
methods of science, and therefore could not affirm that 
anything certain enough to be acted upon existed there. 
The man of natural science, working mainly in the world 
below man, discovered nothing above man, and failed 
even to find what man has commonly regarded as the 
highest in himself. All this is nothing strange, it is the 
fruit of the method. 

We have seen Brooks, too, devoting himself enthusias- 
tically and conscientiously to human life. He loved hu- 
man life, he studied it, lived in the thick of it, gloried in 
it as the swimmer glories in the waves, gave himself to 
knowing it, helping it, making it perfect. While Huxley 
was interpreting existence in terms of the cosmic order, 
he was reading it in terms of the life, relations, and ex- 
perience of the soul. I do not know but that Brooks was 
as truly an expert in human life as Huxley was in life 
below the human. Personality, not included in Huxley's 
field, was the very center of his. For him the universe 
meant what the universe means in view of man the spirit. 
Consequently his formative and dominant thoughts were 
not those of Huxley. In Huxley's world the suggestive 
and ruling thoughts were such as order, structure, de- 
velopment: in Brooks's world they were such as love, 
trust, righteousness, aspiration, purity, spiritual motive. 
Huxley would learn by experiment. Brooks by experience. 
Upon the spiritual ideas and methods the structure of 
existence took form in the mind of Brooks, and he be- 
lieved in the reality of a world where boundless scope 
exists for experience of the soul in the great spiritual acts 
and qualities. The existence that he believed to be real 
contained within itself eternal love and goodness, as well 
as gravitation and chemical affinity. A real basis in the 
eternal order for upward-reaching love and confidence, a 

8i 



IMMORTALITY: A STUDY OF BELIEF 

solid foundation for those experiences which make life 
most significant and precious, he firmly believed to exist. 
He believed that the universe will accommodate man its 
inhabitant; it has room for his higher faculties and 
actions, as well as for his lower. The world of man 
must have a God, and only the world of a good God 
would contain man. By the methods of the nonpersonal 
cosmic order, Huxley was sure that no God could be 
found. By the methods of the personal life. Brooks was 
sure that he had found God and had the right to glory 
in him. 

Now I am not suggesting that Huxley was wrong in 
using his method. He was not wrong, he was right. But 
the question remains whether his method is right for all 
uses. Does it apply to everything? or is there room in 
some regions for another method? The question is not 
whether physical science has a right in the world, but 
whether physical science has a right to the world. Can 
we learn below man all that we need for understanding 
man and for looking above him ? Is there, or is there not, 
a mode of obtaining sound convictions respecting realities 
in the realm of the spirit, which investigation in the world 
below the spirit does not provide? Is it true, or is it not 
true, that the world of personal life is the world in view 
of which existence must receive its best interpretation? 
Is it or is it not the fact that only when man is considered 
can the riddle of existence even begin to be solved? Is 
the animal world or the human world our Rosetta stone 
for translation of the language of the universe ? 

This, I need not say, is no mere question of two men 
and their points of view : it is the question of our age. 
Physical science is oflfering its terms and standards for 
the expression and measurement of all that is. I recently 
read a commendation of the doctrine of conditional hu- 
man immortality, on the ground that it was in perfect 
harmony with biological truth. It was assumed, appar- 

82 



HUXLEY AND PHILLIPS BROOKS 

ently, that biological truth is truth enough to meet the 
case, and that we may justly infer our destiny from the 
destiny of other creatures that have breathed the atmos- 
phere of our planet. So we often find ourselves invited 
to judge human questions in the light, or the darkness, of 
nonhuman considerations ; and when we demur, and ven- 
ture to propose the human as the test for judging the 
human, the spiritual for testing the spiritual, we are told 
that nothing is certainly known about the spiritual apart 
from the physical, and the tests that we know to be valid 
are those of the laboratory and others like them. Yet 
even now religion, willing to save its life, claims a hear- 
ing, and sound philosophy joins with it. Judge a tree by 
its fruit, and by its ripe fruit. Understand an evolving 
system in view of its highest part. Read the meaning of 
the world with, not without, the human. When the 
cosmic system has attained to the production of personal 
beings, then personal facts and relations are the elements 
supreme, and the elements indispensable for understand- 
ing of the system. The best spiritual experience of man 
is better evidence as to the significance of man and the 
reality of God than all that can be learned outside the 
human realm. So declares religion, claiming its right to 
live. Our two men in the lesson of their contrast are a 
parable for the world. The question between them is a 
vital question. If, as Huxley seemed to think, studies 
from the realm of nature below man are to decide all 
questions of the soul, religion is impossible, save through 
ignorance or self-delusion; but if the nature of the soul 
itself is first to be consulted as to the questions of the 
soul, then the scientifically wise are living without their 
birthright of religion and of God, and are blind to the 
truth that they have a birthright. This is the dilemma 
of our day, before which no thoughtful man can long 
stand uncommitted. 

It is well that we discern the real dividing question of 

83 



IMMORTALITY: A STUDY OF BELIEF 

our time, and it was my purpose in the choice of a subject 
today to call attention to it. These two great biographies 
were my opportunity. We are always talking as if the 
great question of our time were some question of the- 
ology, but it is not; it is the question of religion. It is 
the question whether there is a legitimate and available 
place for religion in human life or not. This question is 
raised, as we have seen today, by the searching and honest 
study of the nonhuman world upon scientific methods. 
For religion the question of the day is really a question 
of life and death. Someone may think this the needless 
cry of an alarmist ; and indeed I do not imagine that reli- 
gion is about to die. Nevertheless it is not well to deceive 
ourselves as to the case with which we have to deal. 
Huxley was right in affirming that his method, consist- 
ently used as the one by which all facts of existence 
should be interpreted, rendered confident belief in God 
impossible. It did this for him, and it will do the same 
for any of us. Moreover, the question of life and death 
that is thus raised by the favorite intellectual operations 
of the age is reinforced by all that is materialistic and 
unspiritual in the temper and practices of the time. How 
much there is of this I must not stay to tell, but there is 
enough to keep religion far more on the defensive than 
it ought to be. The vital issue of our day is whether 
religion has a legitimate and effective hold on existence. 
Have we a right to religion? and if we have a right to it, 
can we keep it alive ? Compared with this great issue the 
current questions in theology are but minor matters, and 
the points on which Christian denominations are divided 
are almost infinitesimal. 

Whether we teach theology, or study it, or make use of 
it in preaching, or have simply the common Christian in- 
terest in it, there are certain things that we can do and 
stand for, and that we ought to do and stand for. In this 

84 



HUXLEY AND PHILLIPS BROOKS 

last moment let me put some of them in few words, in the 
form of exhortation. 

1. Insist upon the right of the soul to know its God. 
Hold fast to the birthright. Claim the heavenly liberty, 
the freedom of sons with the Father. Rise to fellowship 
with him so real that no doubt can rob you of your spirit- 
ual inheritance. Encourage all men to think of knowl- 
edge and faith toward God as indeed a birthright which 
no sound knowledge in other fields will ever justly require 
them to surrender. 

2. Hold fast that the universe can be understood only 
in the light of the highest that it contains, and that hence 
the life of the personal spirit is the true interpreter. 
Claim and hold that the eternal realities of existence are 
such as will give true support to the normal and charac- 
teristic life of man, the highest being in the world. Find 
thus a good foundation for that freedom with the Father 
which it is your life to possess. 

3. Construct your theology, if you have a theology to 
construct, on the basis of personality and personal rela- 
tions. Simplify it to meet the demands of this idea. 
Make it straightforward, clear, uncompromising, in its 
omissions as well as its assertions, holding firmly and 
holding only what pertains to personal relations between 
God and men. If this makes a short theology, it will 
make one that stands close to true religion. 

4. Steadily put the warfare of religion at the front, 
before all warfares of theology. Try to make the Chris- 
tian people feel that the warfare of religion for its life 
is really on, and seek the unity of all forces that belong 
on the religious side. Deprecate divisions, avoid strifes 
among friends, and pray and labor for efficient unity 
among those who stand for the essential faith. 



8s 



REVEALED RELIGION 

The Dudleian Lecture at Harvard University, 1903 

If the Honorable Paul Dudley could look in tonight 
upon his beloved Harvard, he might be surprised at many- 
things, and perhaps not least at some facts about his 
lectures. Not to dwell upon his feelings at finding a 
Baptist delivering one, in a house sacred to the memory 
of a revered EpiscopaHan bishop, he might wonder 
greatly at the manner of interpreting terms familiar to 
him and written for permanency in his will. He ex- 
pected the validity of Presbyterian and Congregational 
ordination to be a theme of lasting interest, and the Ro- 
man Catholic Church to stand as a permanent topic in 
polemics. And as to Natural and Revealed Religion, 
the distinction between them he doubtless considered 
clear, and finally established. How could either of these 
terms change its meaning ? His will offers me a consider- 
able range of topics, under the general head of Revealed 
Religion, but I propose to speak of Revealed Religion 
itself, and w^hat we should understand it to be. If he 
were seated on the platform, he might think that on a 
theme so familiar he could forecast the lines of the lec- 
ture; and yet perhaps he could not. He would find 
points of view so changed, and the atmosphere that colors 
thought so altered, that he might scarcely know where 
he was, even on his own lecture platform. How far he 
would approve of modern discourse on Revealed Reli- 
gion at the first hearing, I do not know : and yet I purpose 
to speak of the central substance of the faith. 

86 



REVEALED RELIGION 

We can judge, approximately, what Dudley meant by 
his two larger titles. His will was made in 1750 ; and at 
that time Bishop Butler's "Analogy of Religion, Natural 
and Revealed, to the Constitution and Course of Nature" 
had been fourteen years before the world. This great 
work took its title from the controversies of the time, 
and used words in the senses which they then bore. 
Doubtless Dudley, following Butler, meant by Natural 
and Revealed Religion about what Butler meant. How 
great a mental movement the intervening century and a 
half has registered we perceive, as soon as we breathe 
for an hour, so far as we can breathe, the atmosphere of 
Butler's "Analogy." We should be in another world if 
we could conduct our Apologetics on the basis of But- 
ler's definitions, and induce disputants to meet on what 
he assumed was common ground. That can never be 
done again. 

Yet Butler was a workman of the modern guild, for 
he was seeking to do exactly what is sought today by all 
who wish to find good foundation for religion. He sought 
to ground religion immovably, on foundations as wide as 
nature. A reader is at once impressed by the largeness 
of his scope. He is sure that the lasting constitution of 
the world is harmonious with religion. For Natural Reli- 
gion he finds in the order of the world direct and sure 
support; and his whole argument is intended to prove 
that Revealed Religion, or Christianity, is no more ex- 
posed to valid objection than Natural Religion, or than 
the course of Nature itself. Here he shows a high and 
generous faith in the unity of the world and the religious- 
ness of the universal order. If we moderns, with our 
altered conceptions of Nature, could accomplish in our 
day what Butler undertook in his, we should be benefac- 
tors to all coming time. 

But Butler was working without much help from 
science in his understanding of Nature, without much 

87 



IMMORTALITY: A STUDY OF BELIEF 

help from history in his conception of Religion, and with- 
out much help from psychology in his doctrine of Man. 
This was not his fault, but the defect of his time. May 
our advantage over him not be wasted! I must glance 
for a moment at Butler's main definitions, because I need 
to use them as a background for my own. 

I spoke of his assumptions of common ground for his 
argument. He begins with "taking for proved that there 
is an intelligent Author of Nature, and natural Governor 
of the world." Remember that he is arguing against op- 
ponents all the time, not constructing an argument to suit 
himself : Theism therefore is his postulate to which he as- 
sumes that his opponents will agree. Yet this is no part 
of religion; this belongs to the Constitution and Course 
of Nature. Religion is yet to enter. What then does 
Natural Religion say? It affirms, "that mankind is ap- 
pointed to live in a future state ; that there every one shall 
be rewarded or punished . . . : that our present life is a 
probation, a state of trial or disciphne, for that future 
state." The common ground is Theism, and Natural 
Religion makes this life a probation for another, in w^hich 
rewards and punishments await. And what of Revealed 
Religion when it speaks? That is its burden, for which 
a longer quotation must be made : — "that this world being 
in a state of apostasy and wickedness . . . gave occasion 
for an additional dispensation of Providence, of the 
utmost importance, proved by miracles, but containing 
in it many things strange and not to have been expected ; 
a dispensation of Providence which is a scheme or system 
carried on by a divine person, the Messiah, in order to the 
recovery of the world ; yet not revealed to all, nor proved 
with the strongest possible evidence to those to whom it 
is revealed, but only to such part of mankind, and with 
such particular evidence, as the wisdom of God thought 
fit." 

As to the substance of Revealed Religion, Butler briefly 

88 



REVEALED RELIGION 

enumerates the doctrines which he considers it to include. 
Revelation reaffirms the teaching of Natural Religion, 
and adds to them the doctrine of salvation through Jesus 
Christ, who is the reconciling Saviour. Outside this 
center, he makes little specification of doctrines, for this 
is not his field. His purpose leads him to dwell rather 
upon the evidence on the strength of which Revealed 
Religion is to be received. Here his attitude is extremely 
suggestive. He makes careful argument against the 
alleged unreasonableness, or vulnerability, of the revealed 
substance; but a reader cannot help feeling that he puts 
the contents of revelation on the defensive throughout, 
and has not yet learned to trust their spiritual convincing- 
ness. Most distinctly does he declare his reliance upon 
other evidence. "Proved by miracles," he says, and he 
means it. With him miracles, in which he includes the 
fulfillment of prophecy, are absolutely indispensable. He 
literally stakes everything upon them, for he says, "If it 
can be shown that the proof of these [miracles] is abso- 
lutely none at all, then is revelation overturned." It is a 
bold statement — or else a timid one. It is true that he 
would let this "direct and particular" evidence be sup- 
ported, or completed, by the "general and resulting" evi- 
dence, which he illustrates by comparing it to the "gen- 
eral effect" in architecture ; but without the miracles, he 
affirms, nothing would suffice for proof of revelation. 

Much of this has a far-away sound to us after a cen- 
tury and a half, and indeed it must. How changed is our 
conception of Nature, and how impossible to start an 
argument with Butler's assumptions ! The revolutionary 
gift of science has come in, and we are asked to move 
Theism from one end of the argument to the other, from 
the place of an axiom to that of a conclusion. Change 
too has come upon our thought of religion, for we have 
begun to note the history of it. We cannot draw the line 
between Natural and Revealed Religion where Butler 

89 



IMMORTALITY: A STUDY OF BELIEF 

drew it, and our ideas of evidence in religion are different 
from his. Greatly altered also since that time is our idea 
of Man : and here we strike the road upon which I wish 
to proceed in unfolding the present significance of Re- 
vealed Religion. 

The voice of Butler sounds out of the world in which 
man is regarded as first of all an intellect. The "An- 
alogy" is a study in the interest of religion, but who 
would ever think of making an extract from it for edifi- 
cation? Everywhere is argument, and argument skill- 
fully balanced against argument. This, I own, might be 
only the result of a special purpose, but it is more. We 
are in an atmosphere of intellectualism. The substance 
of revelation is addressed to the intellect. Its evidences 
are external, appealing to the intellect. Truth is stated, 
reasoned for, established, and that seems enough. Re- 
vealed religion is such a thing as miracles can prove, and 
as cannot be proved without them. The conviction that 
miracles are divine works is offered as sufficient to bring 
the conviction of the truths that are revealed. 

This was no peculiarity of Butler, it was the method 
of the time. The whole Deistic controversy was con- 
ducted in dry air. Reasoning was judged competent to 
hold court and settle the questions of religion. God was 
transcendent, or at least outside, and warmth and glow 
from his presence were little felt or expected. But 
neither was this peculiar to that period. Religion has 
often had a dry intellectual atmosphere about it, and that 
for a sufficient cause. It has assumed that man, the being 
who is concerned in religion, is primarily a mind, with 
thinking and reasoning powers for the chief element in 
his constitution. This judgment belongs exclusively to no 
one age or school. Of course it has always been modified 
by the inevitable recognition of other facts ; nevertheless 
for very long this conception of man as primarily an in- 
tellect has been quietly assumed, and has put forth a de- 

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REVEALED RELIGION 

termining influence upon thought and Hfe. The idea 
came naturally enough, and has seemed to deserve the 
prominence it possessed. It was by thinking that man 
found himself out, and discovered what his own powers 
really were. It was by thinking that man learned to rule 
himself, and came into possession of his means of power. 
What more natural than that he should accept the pri- 
macy of his intellect when it had done so much for him, 
and should theorize upon himself as first a thinker? 
Practice easily confirms the position, for there is no exer- 
cise so fascinating as thinking, and none that affords so 
fine a sense of mastery. 

Accompanying this way of looking at men, there has 
come in a conception of truth and the mode of its influ- 
ence, which has determined many things for us all. As 
is our idea of the being who is to be influenced, so will 
our idea be of the influence of truth upon him, and hence 
of truth itself. With man a mind, to whom thought is 
the primary function, the tendency will be to think of 
truth as something that can be stated, and brought home 
to intellectual apprehension. If we cannot state it, that 
only means that we have not got it yet : just so far as we 
have apprehended truth, we shall be able to express it and 
give it clear intellectual treatment. As to the influence of 
truth upon us, we are to be influenced by truth through 
thinking of it. It is to be brought to us by intellectual 
processes, and received into good and honest heads, and 
made influential upon our lives through conviction that 
it has been sufficiently established. Thus in the general 
thinking truth has come to be associated with statements, 
explanations, arguments, defenses, scientific proofs and 
philosophical presentations, until we scarcely know any 
use of truth at all, except to think about it. If I have 
overstated the case a little, no harm has been done. We 
all know that this general view of things has been abroad 
among men for ages. 

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IMMORTALITY: A STUDY OF BELIEF 

Here the idea of revelation enters our present field of 
thought; and it enters under more or less of influence 
from this idea of man. Revelation has long and widely- 
been believed in. From primeval days it has been held 
that truth came to man not by discovery alone, but was 
sometimes revealed to him from a divine source. God 
had his ways with men : the divine flashed truth upon the 
human. Those nearest to God had words from him. 
The matters revealed to these have not been held as 
meant for them alone ; they have been spoken, and written 
out, for the use of the many, and the uplifting influence of 
revealed truth has been accounted an element in the daily 
hope of the world. This has been a fact among all peo- 
ples. But where man was quietly assumed to be first an 
intellect, revelation was conceived accordingly. As man 
is, so will he be addressed. Thus the body of revelation 
comes to consist of definite truth, which is to reach him 
through his mind. Is he not chiefly influenced by what 
he thinks? Does not truth affect and control him by 
being thought upon ? When God reveals truth to him, he 
presents it to his mind, which is his truth-perceiving 
organ. And revealed truth can be stated. It is such stuff 
as doctrines are made of, and creeds, and syllogisms ; and 
it is to enter the affections and reach the will and bless 
the life by passing through the mind. And in this light it 
very naturally comes to be judged that revelation is con- 
fined to matters that man could not otherwise know. 
What men can discover or reason out, they may: what 
God offers is new truth, otherwise undiscoverable, beyond 
the reach of reasoning, perhaps above reason. And thus 
revelation stands forth as something special, occasional, 
transactional. On God's side it is a gift, on man's an 
event. It has its time limits, by its nature. Revealed 
truth comes to be a special deposit in human experience ; 
God has given it and man must act upon it, and the 

92 



REVEALED RELIGION 

dealing, in thought and consequent experience, with this 
definite gift from heaven is a part of man's probation. 

This general idea of revelation has long been in the 
world, and still abides. Many who humbly glory in the 
Christian revelation conceive it as truth that can be 
stated, and would stumble greatly if they were asked to 
imagine any substitute for mental processes as means of 
bringing it home to the heart. And there are many who 
would stumble still more if they were asked to think of 
revelation as not merely a transaction but rather as a pro- 
cess, not Hmited to a moment or a period or finished once 
for all, but as a vital and undying element in the relation 
between God and men. 

But in our time we think somewhat differently of man. 
Of course no one will understand me to mean that the 
intellectual has ever been taken to be the whole of man, 
or on the other hand that it is ever to be left out of sight 
in our portrait of him. But certainly intellectualism has 
lost its dominance in the fundamental definition of man, 
or is losing it. We begin to read our human processes in 
different order. Influences that may seem incongruous 
have conspired to give us a new lesson, and to psychology, 
to poetry, and to practical affairs we are indebted for an 
altered conception of a human being. 

Our modern conception of man is more practical. To 
us the human being appears more as an actor, a putter- 
forth of energy. The primacy among his powers that 
was once allotted to his intellect is giv^n more nearly, in 
our judgment of him, to his will. He seems first of all 
to be a will, a being to whom action is the first necessity. 
That which makes us most truly ourselves is our power 
to do. In the normal arrangement of our powers, knowl- 
edge and feeling, or feeling and knowledge if we choose 
to place them so, are servants of action, rather than ends 
in themselves. Action alone is the genuine expression of 
character. Even character itself, highly as we must prize 

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IMMORTALITY: A STUDY OF BELIEF 

it, is not intended to be a fruitless possession, an acquisi- 
tion that may be regarded as its own end. Character has 
its uses : it is a trust to be employed, not a talent to be 
wrapped up in a napkin as a thing to be taken care of. 
Thought and feeling if they are alone are futile where 
action is possible, and ought not to stand as ends. As 
servants of the living man they find their true place in 
making his self-expressive action what it ought to be: 
but man has his final worth in being an actor who puts 
forth energy for worthy ends. 

This change in our thought of man carries with it an- 
other. We find that when man the actor does act, he puts 
forth his energy under the influence of feeling, even more 
than of thought. Pictures of the human subject calmly 
reasoning out his course, and acting dispassionately in 
view of well-stated considerations that have convinced his 
intellect, will never again be taken as fair representation 
of the actual humanity. Far more typical is the picture of 
a man stirred to the depths, inspired by a passion, aglow 
with the feeling that existing realities have aroused, rush- 
ing forth to his act under strong impulse from within. 
It is true that this is not the whole of life, for many acts 
are reasoned out, or otherwise performed under mental 
persuasion; and innumerable deeds are done in routine, 
and have but faint character: but as for deeds that are 
most thoroughly characteristic and express the most of 
men, they may indeed have been justified by reasons, but 
even then they are oftenest performed out of the glowing 
heart, or else under the strong impulse of the moral sense. 
Love and hate, desire, hope, fear, conscience, ambition, 
aspiration, are the forces that do the work. Thinking 
precedes, accompanies and follows, but action, which is 
the crisis of life, seems to require the auspices of passion, 
affection, or inward need. 

This is a revolutionary view of man, for it opens new 
phases of the manner in which truth becomes effective. 

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REVEALED RELIGION 

On the old basis, truth does its work through the intellect, 
and becomes effective by being thought out, or accepted 
on evidence. So Butler planned. On the newer basis, 
to be influenced by truth is to be so impressed by some 
reality as to act in view of it. If we are actors, it is the 
will that gives truth the real answer. Mere contempla- 
tion is but cool injustice to reality: justice to reality con- 
sists in practical response. And if action springs more 
from feeling than from thought, it follows that the effec- 
tiveness of truth upon a man is determined largely by 
the way he feels about it. When truth has wrought such 
moral conviction, moved such affection, aroused such 
feeling, awakened such desire, stirred such passion, that 
a man will do the thing it calls for, then first has truth 
conquered him and done upon him its proper work. It 
is feeling that clamors for action : thought may be content 
without it. And so, with the modern thought of human 
nature, if we wish for action in which a man shall be his 
best, we shall do well to seek an influence from some 
great reality upon what we call his heart. What is need- 
ful is, that truth put forth some moving power, and the 
man respond. 

If we think thus of man as actor, and as actor moved 
most by his heart, we have material for some fresh views 
of revelation. 

Return a moment to the older view. If there is any 
such thing as revelation, it comes from God. It presup- 
poses a God who desires to bring high truth to bear upon 
men for their good ; and it implies, or means, that some- 
how, in accordance with his strong and friendly will, 
realities that have power upon human duty and welfare 
are brought home to human heart and life. Many have 
l)een the pictorial forms in which the act of revealing has 
been set forth. Revelation is conveyed by voice from 
heaven, by graving upon rock, by conventional sacred 
signs, by inward whisper to the soul, by inspiration of 

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IMMORTALITY: A STUDY OF BELIEF 

words to be spoken, by dictation of words to be written. 
Written records have been relied upon to preserve the 
body of truth revealed. Most of these portrayals sug- 
gest, or have been suggested by, the intellectual idea of 
man and truth. Truths undiscoverable have been given 
by God. They have been given in words, and are to be 
taken into the common stock of thoughts, mentally appre- 
hended, spiritually accepted, and practically appHed. 

I am not ruling this method out : but I note that now 
we look into the face of man the actor — man upon whom 
truth is to be influential through his being moved by it. 
Man is now to be impelled. What then will revelation be ? 

Revelation may not always be the presentation of truth 
in forms for the mind. It may consist at heart in the 
setting free of a spiritual power to perform its impelling 
work. In accordance with the strong and friendly will 
of God, some divine, eternal, spiritual force, adapted to 
influence our life, may be started into effect, or placed in 
new conditions of power, where it will exert its proper 
influence in making character and conduct. Some great 
spiritual reality may be launched into efifectiveness, so 
that it touches the heart and moves the springs of action. 
This will be revelation to m.an the actor, and revelation 
good and Godworthy. Evidently a truth that is thus 
launched into power need not be totally new, unknown 
and undiscoverable. It may be so, or not. But probably 
any spiritual verity set free for such divine conquest will 
be one that men know well enough to give it access to 
them, and yet need to know far better. It will have con- 
nection with what is known already, else it would be 
powerless, but it will be truth that the world is suffering 
for ; and the result will be that men are aroused, inspired, 
and led to action, by the spiritual force that has been set 
free upon them. Such revelation will not need to be 
attested by miracles, or certified by fulfillment of proph- 

95 



REVEALED RELIGION 

ecy. It is attested by its own evidence, and certified by 
its own reality. 

Come now to the events in which our Christianity had 
its origin. Bishop Butler, and Paul Dudley, believed that 
when Jesus Christ appeared in the world there was made 
from God a revelation which has been effective ever 
since. I believe the same. And wherein did the revela- 
tion consist? The question is variously answered. To 
find the body of thoughts, the expressed truth, that God 
revealed by Jesus, we are referred to his recorded 
words ; or to his words together with those of his disci- 
ples; or to the New Testament as a whole; or to the 
authorized tradition of the Church. Often a regular sys- 
tem of thought is held to have been revealed : I have seen 
a book entitled "A Handbook of Revealed Theology." 
I need not say that the element of clear and intelligible 
thought in the revelation of Jesus Christ stands fast for- 
ever: and yet there is need of another emphasis. I am 
well convinced that our modern thought concerning man 
and the influence of truth upon him is vastly nearer to 
Jesus' point of view than Butler's was. I believe there- 
fore that we can grasp the meaning of Revealed Religion 
more clearly, and more Christianly, than Butler could. 
It was man the actor, man the will and heart, that Jesus 
Christ addressed, far more than it was man the thinker : 
and it is on the side of heart and action, rather than of 
thinking, that religion, in every age, most directly ad- 
dresses itself to men. 

This last statement is supported by all the definitions of 
religion. Religion is not first an element in thought, but 
an element in life. It implies thought, and includes 
thought, but it is primarily experience. It is the experi- 
ence of man in having to do with God. It is the life he 
lives in relation with God. Religion has always been, as 
Mr. John Fiske so impressively showed, the response of 
life within to reality without, the answer of the soul to 

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IMMORTALITY: A STUDY OF BELIEF 

invisible powers that silently impinge upon it. It has 
consisted in the sense of God in the soul, bringing the 
sense of mystery, of duty, of need, of possibility. Out of 
this living sense of divine realities have come the acts of 
worship, the plans for winning divine favor, the institu- 
tions of religion, the statements of doctrine. Man was 
born to live in the world with God, and feel that he was 
living there; and religion is the phase of his life that 
corresponds to this phase of his being. 

Who does not see that in this light the field of religion 
is the field for revelation? Here on the one hand are 
men, with feeling of unseen things, but vague, unclear, 
untrue, in spiritual perception; with conscience, but con- 
science unenlightened ; with capacity for holy passion, but 
too unholy and sinful to be moved by it. There on the 
other hand is God. Men have called him many, but he 
has all the time been one. They have assigned to him a 
hundred characters, but he has always been the same, — 
holy, gracious, watchful over his world. With God as 
he is and men as they are and religion the meeting-place 
of the two, revelation seems the one appropriate thing, 
and the one thing certain. There will be manifestations 
of the eternal verities to the human mind, and there will 
come the setting free of the eternal realities to act with 
their appropriate power upon the human heart and will. 

When did revelation in this sense begin? Since we 
believe in the God and Father of Jesus Christ, I do not 
see how we can fail to think that he has always been in 
communication with the human race. In accordance with 
that strong and friendly will of which I spoke, he has 
always been setting spiritual forces free to influence men 
for good. One summer Sunday morning, on my ve- 
randa, I read the late Mr. Fiske's "Through Nature to 
God," and found him saying that as vision is the response 
of life to light, and hearing is its response to sound, so 
religion is the soul's response to unseen reality. I remem- 

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REVEALED RELIGION 

ber my strong inclination to write to the author and ask 
him how, as he conceived it, the spiritual reality, invisible, 
made its impression on the soul, and whether he was not 
postulating on the part of God, in all ages, the activity 
to which I would give the name of revelation. Because 
I am a Christian, I believe that God has always been send- 
ing forth helpful influences upon his human race. Poor 
enough the response has been, but God has never left him- 
self without a witness. 

But the Revealed Religion which is our theme tonight 
is that which came in among men with Jesus Christ : and 
so we have to ask how he fulfilled the idea of revelation, 
and what gift of truth and power he brought to the world. 
Both in Butler's sense and ours, Jesus Christ brought and 
imparted Revealed Religion. This of course is no new 
saying, it is the same old claim. But what has now been 
said may perhaps help us to set the claim in its true light. 
His gift is accurately described when we call it Revealed 
Religion, and the religion that he revealed is what the 
world wants today, and tomorrow. 

It is often said that the conception of God which the 
modern world holds as vital has been derived essentially 
from Jesus Christ. Certainly this is true. Of course this 
does not mean that what he imparted had no vital connec- 
tion with what was known before, or that no influence 
but his would have been contributory to our knowledge 
of God. Both these things would be impossible. Yet the 
God whom we worship differs immeasurably from any 
God who has been worshiped elsewhere than by Chris- 
tians, and differs mainly because of Jesus' contribution to 
Revealed Religion. Then surely, we say, we shall be able 
to point out his contribution, and identify it clearly. But 
when we ask just what it was that Jesus revealed, or im- 
parted, concerning God, from which came so great a 
change, the answer that we can give in terms of the intel- 
lect is somewhat disappointing. Prophets and psalmists 

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IMMORTALITY: A STUDY OF BELIEF 

had much in common with him. A comprehensive doc- 
trine of God, with the quaHties that Jesus emphasized 
set forth in clear relief, it is not easy to draw from his 
recorded words. Doctrinal statements did not constitute 
the heart of his revelation; but what he did impart, and 
how he imparted it, we learn quickly when we follow his 
leading. Jesus made revelation in the practical field of 
religion. God is the eternal reality which stands at the 
heart of religion : and Jesus placed this eternal reality in 
range with men, and men in range with it, so that its 
supreme spiritual power might go forth upon them. He 
flung forth from that central verity, God, a mastering 
force to take possession of human heart and will, and 
bum as a living power of religion in the human life. 

Even in the moment that is now available the heart of 
his revelation may at least be dimly seen. Jesus spoke as 
one who knew God well, not in abstract fashion, but in 
personal manner. He lived the human life as one to 
whom God was all that God could be to one who loves 
and trusts him. Thus men beheld him, and thus he spoke 
to them, — men, to whom this one thing had always been 
lacking : God had not been to them all that God might be. 
To them religion was deficient, for God the reality had 
never come forth upon them in clearness and power, to 
make his impression on heart and life. They had not 
been overshadowed by the great reality, or lifted into high 
religion by the strong drawing of the living God. Grop- 
ing after the divine fact, they had found it only in some 
partial way that disappointed even more than it satisfied 
their needs. What they wanted was a mastering sense of 
the God that is, and as he is : and this is what men want to 
this day, who have not learned it from Jesus Christ. 
Now came the revelation, the sending forth into heart 
and life of the spiritual power of God the reality. "See 
him," says Jesus: "Behold him holy, awful, glorious. 
But he is your Father. The all-holy God loves you, and 

100 



REVEALED RELIGION 

hates your sin. All his desire for you is that you may be 
right, and fulfill yourselves in the right life, children in his 
family. He loves you with the only love that can break 
or melt the heart, the love of sacrifice. His heart bends 
to you, he bears your burdens and your sins, he loves you 
with a love of which the most self-sacrificing love you 
ever saw on earth is but an illustration. Trust him, live 
with him, fill your whole soul and life with the glad sense 
of his presence and his care : and he will make all things 
new. He will command your most honorable devotion, 
call out all your manliest powers, claim your noblest 
loyalty, and make you alive with life that will thrill within 
you as life eternal. He will make you hate evil, love your 
fellow men, help every good cause, and live the life of 
contagious spiritual health among men. You may live 
for him, and suffer for him and die for him, and be thank- 
ful for the call to die for so high a Name." 

This, in the life and death of Jesus, was not cool teach- 
ing, but impassioned and passion-moving utterance. It 
was utterance of truth in the form of power. It would 
be possible to formulate this utterance about God into a 
doctrine for the intellect — and indeed some formulation 
of it was necessary, and sure to be made : but Jesus gave 
it as revelation for the heart and impulse for the whole 
being. He revealed God to be loved and lived with, God 
to be acted upon, God to be all that God can be to men. 

Am I preaching? Perhaps I am. It is impossible to 
speak of religion without preaching — that is, unless one 
is content to speak of it far out on the circumference, and 
miss the point. But the time would fail me if I should 
tell of the themes for preaching which I have not even 
named, but which are involved in the simplest presenta- 
tion of Revealed Religion as we have it in Christianity. 
The fact that Christianity has always been a religion of 
preaching is one of its best commendations as a religion 
of the revelation of the true and living God. 

lOI 



IMMORTALITY: A STUDY OF BELIEF 

It is fair to say that revelation proves itself actual by 
the fact that it reveals. When light comes, men see ; and 
if there has been true revealing of God, we shall expect 
to see God moving gloriously in his world in consequence, 
and exerting the spiritual power of manifested reality. 
This is the due sequel of revelation, or, if we like to call 
it so, it is revelation continued. I need not dwell upon 
the fact that this is exactly what has come to pass. The 
spiritual power that sprang from Jesus is beyond our 
words. Some forty years ago the English-speaking world 
received into the body of its suggestive literature "Ecce 
Homo," a startling, inspiring, revolutionary study of the 
human life of Jesus. Over against the title-page stood 
the promise of a second book by the same author, to be 
entitled, "Christ as the Creator of Modern Theology and 
Religion." For some reason unannounced, the promise 
was never fulfilled: but that from the standpoint of 
"Ecce Homo" such a promise was made, is a fact worthy 
to be pondered. And the promise was a good one, for it 
spoke truly — save that it should have read, "Christ as 
the Creator of Modern Religion and Theology," instead 
of holding the order "Theology and Religion." He was 
Creator of Religion first, and of Theology afterwards. 
Creative in religion indeed he was. Back in the first 
Christian age we see his revelation of God in the very 
process of its work. This is what occurred : God, as 
he was known in Christ, became to men more of what 
God may be. Spiritual power streamed forth from him 
as the supreme reality, and men were impelled by it into 
newness of life. In a sense, after a time the impulse was 
lost: it was so imperfectly received and apprehended as 
partly to miss its hold, so that from simple, strong religion 
the Church turned to a life in which ecclesiasticism and 
credalism had an excessive share: and yet the impulse 
has never really been spent, but has renewed itself from 
age to age with the renewing of the need. Under the 

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REVEALED RELIGION 

religious influence of Jesus men have been lifted into 
power to live according to God, responding to actual influ- 
ence from the eternal holiness and love. Doctrine of God 
and the new life has come forth from the experience, and 
in turn has confirmed and clarified the life, — for The- 
ology is the offspring of Religion, not its parent, — and the 
power of religion has always dwelt, as at first, in the 
vital entrance of the divine reality to the sphere of human 
love and will. 

There is a fine picture of revelation and what it means, 
quoted by Principal Shairp from Thomas Erskine, one of 
the truest of all the sons of God. As I read it, let it stand 
as a parable : for humanity might speak thus of its need 
and its experience of the gift from above. Principal 
Shairp is telling his remembrance of a conversation with 
Erskine. "He spoke of the awful silence of God, how it 
sometimes became oppressive, and the heart longed to 
hear in answer to its cry some audible voice. Then he 
quoted that word, 'Be not silent to me, O Lord, lest if 
thou be silent to me I become like them that go down to 
the pit.' Then he added, *But it has not always been 
silence to me. I have had one revelation : it is now, I am 
sorry to say, a matter of memory to me. It was not a 
revelation of anything that was new to me. After it I 
did not know anything which I did not know before. But 
it was a joy for which one might bear any sorrow. I felt 
the power of love, that God is love, that he loved me, that 
he had spoken to me' — and then, after a long pause, 'that 
he had broken silence to me.' As he spoke he touched me 
quickly on the arm, as if to indicate the direct impact 
from on high of which he had been aware." So in Christ 
has mankind received direct impact from on high, bring- 
ing in the sense that God has broken silence and that God 
is love, bringing a joy for which humanity itself may bear 
any sorrow. 

The function of religion in the world, and the need of 

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IMMORTALITY: A STUDY OF BELIEF 

it too, is always the same : and in the Revealed Religion 
of Jesus Christ the function is fulfilled, and the need is 
satisfied, so well that we have no reason to ask for any- 
thing better, save as this may proceed to do its perfect 
work. 

The service of religion is, to keep present in the com- 
mon life and thought an actual mastering power from the 
unseen reality with which the soul has to do. The story 
of religion in the world is a tragical story, for the master- 
ing power of the unseen has often been only too real when 
it was not most helpful. Religion has brought in the 
influence depressingly, and corruptingly. Dark and cheer- 
less views, or corrupt and depraving views, of divine 
things have been impressive on the soul. In great parts 
of the world, we know, this is still the case. Even with 
the Christian revelation inferior views of God, born of 
human imperfection and sin, have mingled, to the dimin- 
ishing of its power. Religious conceptions are not less 
influential for being inferior in moral tone: on the con- 
trary they have a special grasp on imperfect humanity 
through their very imperfectness. But if we could get 
and keep, separate from all enfeebling intermixtures, the 
mastering power of God as Jesus brought it in, we should 
have at work incomparably the best power that the world 
has ever felt, and the power that it needs today. 

Modern life is one-sided, with an overbalance of the 
visible and the visibly practical. The general life suffers 
for want of a right sense of the invisible: religious life 
from deficiency of rehgion, and Christian life for want 
of full Christianity. In a word, life suffers unutterably 
from the want of a living sense of the eternal goodness. 
Jesus brought that in, and the fullness of his gift is what 
is needed for the completion of the present age. Once 
more look at his gift. God, the most real of realities, 
present in life as sunlight is present in the day ; true, pure, 
searching, judging, condemning, reproving, saving, heal- 

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REVEALED RELIGION 

ing, cleansing; God, gracious, trustworthy, helpful, com- 
forting, strength-giving, inspiring, ruling all for a worthy 
end ; his reality the most refreshing and upHfting fact in 
time or eternity, the keynote of a new song that shall 
never die, the inspiration of hope and courage, of conse- 
cration and holy power, because the pledge of victory over 
evil: a God to live and die for with joy unspeakable — 
this is what Jesus Christ revealed, or released as a mas- 
tering spiritual force to do its work. I need not tell how 
deeply the modern age needs just this moral force. Many 
think the existence of such a God incredible in the age 
of science. Many think it is too good to be true. Many 
are dumb with doubt. Many resent it as too exacting. 
But all the world needs the sense of the reality of the 
God and Father of Jesus Christ; and of this God Jesus 
is still the revealer. The world needs it for the inspira- 
tion of its higher hope, and the maintaining of the vigor 
of its higher effort. If we come under this influence to 
the full, we shall have the gift of peace in our thoughts 
of God, but peace will be only the prelude to the gift of 
pov/er. Calmness will be the standing-ground for energy, 
and restfulness will pass over into hope that makes life 
strong. Nothing breathes power and purpose into a life 
like genuine faith in the God whom Jesus Christ makes 
known. 

We are saying now-a-days that religion, to do the work 
of the present time, must take on a social aspect. Reli- 
gion has been associated with individualism, and perhaps 
some of its excesses: it must show itself adapted to the 
field of solidarity. We are finding that man is a race, 
and beginning to suspect how much that means. With 
mankind bound together in mutual dependence, higher 
forces, coming in, will do well to reinforce the spirit of 
unity and common help : they cannot do better. A reli- 
gion that keeps a man's eyes fixed on heaven, or even 
keeps his thoughts centered upon God, to the exclusion of 

105 



IMMORTALITY: A STUDY OF BELIEF 

his fellows, will not do. Men outside the Christian circle 
are beginning to talk in this strain ; but so the Master of 
Christians talked from the beginning. This is the Chris- 
tian doctrine, — wronged by selfishness and hidden under 
excessive individualism, but Christian originally and for- 
ever. One God, one family: one Father, God, many 
brothers, men: thou shalt love thy God, thou shalt love 
thy neighbor : love thy brother whom thou hast seen, or 
thou canst not love God whom thou hast not seen: he 
laid down his life for us, we ought to lay ours down for 
our brothers : "the soul is lost that's saved alone." The 
divine impulse is the social impulse. Revealed Religion 
means the setting free of the force of mutual helpfulness. 
A doctrine of helpfulness, professed, may be only the 
letter that kills, but the spirit of helpfulness is included in 
the Christian power. 

Now my word is spoken, all but a final syllable. It 
may be thought that thus to insist upon religion as be- 
longing first to man the actor is to run great risk of 
wronging religion in its intellectual aspect. Man can 
never cease to be a thinker, and the intellectual presenta- 
tion of the substance of his faith will always be normal 
to him. He will need it too, for the wise guiding and 
true protection of his spiritual life. Is it not dangerous 
then to throw stress so strongly on the practical side, and 
attribute so much to the heart, the notoriously unsteady 
heart, with its affections and impulses? Should not this 
be balanced by the intellectual work, wherein great souls 
in all ages have so abundantly glorified God? To all of 
which I freely assent, but I defend myself by two facts. 
One is that the intellectual aspect of religion may well be 
trusted to take care of itself, and keep itself in evidence. 
It will not be forgotten. The other is that in the light of 
experience we certainly do need a new emphasis, and 
such an emphasis as I have been pleading for. It is in 
religion as it is in education. We have sought out our 

io6 



REVEALED RELIGION 

principles, and constructed our far-reaching educational 
systems, and built up our great plants, on the intellectual 
basis, for the training and the filling of the thinking mind 
of man; and when we have got them well at work, with 
their traditions growing into an orthodoxy, we begin to 
perceive that the human being needs to be trained as 
actor, worker, citizen, neighbor, social force, member of 
a race, brother to mankind, moral agent, center of radia- 
tion, child of God, immortal, — and that discipline of his 
intellect, useful as it is, may not cover all this ground. 
In like manner we have built our large institutions of reli- 
gion on ideas, and drawn our lines of division along 
where differences of idea run, and given out that we 
stand for this or that intellectual presentation of Chris- 
tianity — in which we have not been altogether wrong, 
any more than in our schemes of education too exclu- 
sively intellectual. But in the religious world we find a 
great unrest abroad, amounting to alarm, because of the 
advent of a new set of ideas, unfamiliar in this region, 
which seem to threaten the ideas we have held and with 
them our religion itself. The unrest is largely due to 
our having held our religion too much as a matter of 
ideas, and built too many ideas into what we looked upon 
as our foundations — ^too much as a matter of ideas, and 
too little as a living power of God. What we need most is 
a great renaissance of religion itself, as a vital force, to 
simplify our religious processes, to still our unrest, to 
banish our alarms, and to nerve us with spiritual might 
for the conflicts and achievements to which our age is 
summoned. 



107 



THE YOUNG MINISTER'S OUTLOOK 

Delivered before the Missionary Society of Andover 
Theological Seminary in 1903 

It is an honor to stand in this place tonight. Many a 
great man has stood here in past days, and many a great 
word has here been spoken. I am reminded that Horace 
Bushnell, in 1839, here deHvered his great address on 
Revelation, and made the first clear utterance of that 
heresy which darkened the immediate days with contro- 
versy, but helped to brighten the following time for the 
universal church. Dr. Bushnell was in Hartford, and 
by reason of a change in arrangements did not know till 
Sunday night that his address must be given here on 
Tuesday afternoon. Out of a full mind he wrote the 
entire address on Monday ; then he rode all night by stage 
from Hartford to Worcester, drove from Worcester to 
Andover where he arrived just in time for dinner, and 
directly after dinner met his audience and made his 
speech. That was a thirty-six hours' work that needs no 
comment. It was too great to be imitated, but none the 
less it was a glorious example. Coming into the succes- 
sion, I thought first of offering you a theological address ; 
but my mood changed when I remembered the original 
missionary and practical intent of your Society, and I 
found myself inclined to treat a practical theme in your 
presence. I shall be best satisfied if I can look about me 
in the living world, and speak of the issues of life for the 
young men whom I am addressing. And so my subject 

io8 



THE YOUNG MINISTER'S OUTLOOK 

is, The Young Minister's Outlook — which is certainly 
a practical theme. 

This simple and familiar title suggests the question 
whether I can say anything but commonplaces on my sub- 
ject. There are two reasons why I venture to hope for 
something better. For one thing, I address young minis- 
ters, and I am old enough to speak to them in the manner 
of a father. I have passed over their road, and gone on 
into the region to which it leads. Of the present outlook 
I can judge at least as one who has had experience. I am 
aware, indeed, how James Russell Lowell has confessed 
the danger that besets men of his kind — but not neces- 
sarily men of mine — in such a case : 

"Poets, as their heads grow gray, 
Look from too far behind the eyes, 
Too long-experienced to be wise 
In guileless youth's diviner way; 
Life sings not now, but prophesies; 
Time's shadows they no more behold, 
But, under them, the riddle old 
That mocks, bewilders and defies." 

But I am no poet, and I am, as I grow older, a believer 
in the wisdom of age. I know that I know what once I 
could not know, and it may be that I can therefore speak 
a helpful word. And I deny that to me life sings no 
more. It prophesies, and the riddle is real, but it also 
sings — in a different tone from that of youth, but I 
often think in a tone that is richer, and that must be more 
like that of the song in which we hope by and by to 
join. It is thus that I defend myself before my own con- 
science, as one who may perhaps say something more 
than commonplaces about the young minister's outlook. 
And, for another thing, nothing that relates to my sub- 
ject is at present commonplace. Time was when the min- 
istry was in some degree a profession of recluses; at 
least it was somewhat separate and special, and the ques- 
tions that related to it were somewhat removed from the 

109 



IMMORTALITY: A STUDY OF BELIEF 

central field of interest. That time is past. Of course 
there are still questions that directly interest ministers 
alone, but they are few, and his outlook does not depend 
upon them. Once, the topics that were of immediate 
concern to ministers seemed unimportant to the many: 
now, they are of interest to all men. The ministry has 
moved out into the open. The young minister's outlook 
depends upon considerations that affect all people. That 
outlook depends now upon the state of the world and the 
state of the church; upon social ideals and religious ex- 
periences ; upon the tariff and the denominations ; upon 
the labor question and the higher criticism; upon educa- 
tion, civilization, sin, the slums, and the Spirit of God. 
Everything has to do with it. In a larger sense than ever 
before a minister of Christ must say, "I am a man, and 
nothing human do I count foreign to myself." And so 
my topic leads me out of the field of commonplaces, into 
the land of burning questions. If there is a workman 
here, or a housewife, or a boy in his teens, the facts and 
questions that I must touch will appeal to each of these, 
as truly as to the young minister of whom I speak. 
Watch me through, and see whether so much as for a 
moment I go outside the range of the universal human 
interest. 

As to the form in which I shall order my discourse, 
perhaps I shall do well to report the contents of an imag- 
inary question box. I will suppose that the young minis- 
ters in whose destinies I am interested have placed here, 
for me to answer, the questions that concern them as they 
face their outlook as it is today. Possibly I may be able 
to give the discourse rather more of unity than the actual 
question box would provide, for the questions will be my 
own. All that I desire is, that the matters most essential 
in considering the young minister's outlook may come 
before us. A young man, looking about him to find 
where he is, asks me, This newness in our work as minis- 
no 



THE YOUNG MINISTER'S OUTLOOK 

ters — how much is there in itf They tell us we are going 
into untried regions. How far is it so? Are we going 
out to do a different work from that of our fathers? 

The newness is very real. Newness, of course, is no 
new thing, for no day is just like another, and no genera- 
tion inherits the same as its predecessor. But the new- 
ness in the minister's lot today has one peculiarity. In an 
unusual degree it is felt in advance. For my part, I have 
moved into a new world in the course of my ministry: 
how different my present world is from the world of my 
youth, I cannot make young eyes see. But I did not 
expect it. No one told me. In my circle, at least, no one 
stood by to tell me how unlike the next length of the road 
was to the last. I moved on not foreseeing, and found 
things new, the road untried, as I went on. But now 
there is a keen sense of the newness of the future. One 
tells another of it, and young men look into one another's 
eyes wondering what it will be. Foreglimpses reveal but 
little, and beginners must needs go forward quivering 
with a sense of the newness of the road. Joshua said, 
of old, "Ye have not passed this way heretofore," but 
now the word is that no one ever passed this way. 

The newness is very real, and probably it is not often 
exaggerated in our forecasts. Like all newness in pros- 
pect, it is not half realized. Neither young eyes nor 
older ones can see just how much it means. The untried 
is always so. But if a young minister asks whether his 
work is to be decidedly Hke the work of his fathers, or 
like the work he is now observing in the ministry, the 
answer of truth must be that he cannot build upon a very 
close resemblance. Changes have come already, and in- 
fluences that must make further changes are in the air. 
Nay, while we speak, change is going on. It is little 
to say that the average work of the minister fifty years 
ago will never be done again. What we have left behind 
is not the important element: the important element is 

III 



IMMORTALITY: A STUDY OF BELIEF 

what is coming. The beginner of 1903 may be at work 
in 1950. No one knows what the present rushing tide 
of change will bring before that time, but everyone must 
know that it will bring much that is new. I do not know 
what the average minister's work thirty years from now 
will be. What changes will have come in denominational 
forms and life, it is impossible to foresee, but the cer- 
tainty of such change is looming in the air before us. 
Altered social conditions will bring unpredictable changes 
in pastoral methods. New modes of doing good will 
have to be accepted and put to use : experiments must be 
tried in full sincerity, and the method that does the good 
must be followed. Preaching is already changing, and is 
destined to change still more. Before ministerial careers 
that are begun this year are ended, there may be in use 
ministerial methods that have never yet been foreseen at 
all, and the work, at least in some instances, may be of a 
kind that would surprise us all if we could have a glimpse 
of it. Yes, there is very much in the newness of which 
we talk. Just what is in it, no man can tell, but the young 
minister certainly sets out upon a new road. 

It would seem probable that in a new road there would 
be no ruts ; but I fear this is a case in which so cheerful 
a prediction cannot be made. Be generous and forgive 
the mixing of metaphors if I say that in traveling this 
new road a minister can carry his ruts with him. This 
indeed is the supreme danger. The supreme need of our 
young minister, so far as methods are concerned, is 
flexibility. That which his outlook absolutely requires 
him to possess is a mind quick, versatile, ready, able to 
break with a custom, capable of attacking problems be- 
fore unknown, competent to plan and undertake the ser- 
vice that is demanded by conditions that are new. Life 
among us is even now rushing on into forms that render 
many of our methods obsolete, and if our minister has 
neither heart nor head for adapting his work to the neces- 

112 



THE YOUNG MINISTER'S OUTLOOK 

sities of his hour, he will miss his opportunity and invest 
his labor without returns. Quick work is what the 
church must have or be left behind. The young minis- 
ter's outlook shows him a place where he will be needed 
as inspirer of quick resolve and wise, swift judgment in 
the people he leads ; a place vv^here he must be ready for 
new enterprise and able to seize the moment when it 
comes. One man will have to meet this condition in one 
form, and another in another, but this outlook, in some 
form, lies before every man whose face is turned toward 
the ministry of the future. "New occasions teach new 
duties," and it is indispensable that our minister be a 
man who can discern the occasions and learn the duties. 

This looks exacting, and exacting it is. Also the future 
looks uncertain. If the work is thus unpicturable before- 
hand, and no one can know just what it is to be, a ques- 
tion of practical wisdom may arise. How many will be 
needed? How many ought to prepare themselves? and 
so someone asks me, Are young ministers too many? Or 
are there not enough f 

It is not an easy question to answer whether there are 
too many ministers, and whether too many are seeking 
to become ministers. Sometimes it seems as if there 
were too many, as when some important church needs 
one pastor and is told where it could get a hundred. 
Sometimes it seems as if there were too few, as when the 
same church out of the hundred can scarcely find one 
who will do — too few, at least, of the right kind. I shall 
not attempt to decide whether there are too many minis- 
ters, or whether too many young men are entering the 
ministry. But one thing it is right to say. If among the 
young ministers seeking entrance to the work is one who 
has been moved like a chessman thither by circumstances 
or by friends or by inertia or by unworthy ideals ; if 
there is one who feels no inward urging and is aware of 
no message that he must deliver; then there is one too 

113 



IMMORTALITY: A STUDY OF BELIEF 

many. However the general fact may be, one can be 
spared. The outlook is exacting. One who has no im- 
pulse and no message ought not to be attracted by it. No 
message, no minister, ought to be the rule. 

No message, no minister? and what is a message? A 
message is something, one's own, that one feels he must 
utter, because he knows it to be needed. This at least 
is the ordinary and first-thought definition of a message. 
I am reminded that long ago I had occasion to attempt 
a definition of preaching, and found it no easy matter to 
frame a definition that would cover just enough and not 
too much. Recently I attempted it again, this time not 
attempting to draw the line so closely, and I said. Preach- 
ing is public personal utterance of religious truth, for 
personal application. It is public utterance of what is 
one's own in religious truth, that others may take as their 
own and put it to its use. Thus it is the delivery of a 
message. Nevertheless, though this is all true, the first- 
framed conception of a message needs to be enlarged, for 
the deep good reason that it seems to lay the sole empha- 
sis on words. The snare of the ministry is the promi- 
nence of talk. Speech, glorious and useful gift as it is, 
becomes our peril. We are expected to talk, and com- 
pelled to talk, until we are in danger of thinking that 
because we have preached a truth we have practiced it 
and that when we have uttered a message we have done it 
justice. Our own time, with all its faults, is coming to 
have this virtue, that it asks more and more for what is 
real ; and the young minister's outlook reaches on into a 
life in which his message will need to be conceived in 
other terms than those of speech. A message is not 
merely something important, one's own, that one is im- 
pelled to put into words. A man's message may be some- 
thing that cannot be put into words : it may be some ser- 
vice that one desires to render, some work of helpfulness 
for which one is impelled to offer himself. Along with 

114 



THE YOUNG MINISTER'S OUTLOOK 

the strong impulse to utterance in words, there may go, 
and there ought to go, the strong impulse to utter one's 
heart in work, and be a servant of men who can be 
helped. God forgive us for having pictured our work 
as a service of talking, and help us to portray it more and 
more as a service of living, planning, doing, for the good 
of men. Taking the word in this broad twofold meaning, 
of word and deed, we are surely right in saying that the 
rule ought to be, no message, no minister. Our young 
man will find himself where if he has no message he has 
no rightful place. 

What is the nature of the message, in this time of 
nezvness? someone asks me next. What ought the young 
minister to feel himself impelled to deliver? Is the 
needed message social? Hozv much is there in the fre- 
quent claim that the message of the ministry must now 
be in a new sense a social message? 

In a true sense, yes, the message must be a social one. 
There is much in this frequent claim. Two great facts 
go to make this true. The problems of modern life are 
mainly the problems of living together. How man ought 
to live with man, trade with trade, class with class, nation 
with nation, — these are the questions of today, and will 
be the vital questions through more than one long life- 
time. Almost all the living questions of the world resolve 
themselves into this one great question. How labor and 
capital should live together ; whether nations should trade 
with or without tariff restrictions ; how housewives and 
servants should deal with one another; how cities should 
be governed ; what the rich should do for the poor ; how 
prisons should be conducted; what should be done with 
fortunes acquired by fraud or by oppression ; what public 
education should be ; what the church should expect to do 
for the general welfare : — all these questions and a hun- 
dred more are alike, — ^they are forms of the social ques- 
tion, which is very nearly the one large question of life 

"5 



IMMORTALITY: A STUDY OF BELIEF 

today. Now that intercommunication has brought the 
world together, and the crowding of Hfe has forced men 
into new forms of contact, all problems are social prob- 
lems, and of course all social problems are ethical prob- 
lems. The reforms and betterments that are now re- 
quired must be made by movement of groups or masses ; 
they cannot be made by individuals acting separately. A 
long day of individualism has been upon us, in which the 
separate person has stood forth to claim his liberty and 
his other rights, and has been appealed to as the one from 
whom the needful gifts for mankind must proceed. But 
as soon as individuals stand out well defined, they stand 
in groups, and the groups must get on together ; and the 
period of grouping which inevitably follows the age of 
individualism is now upon us. Accordingly, we must 
now seek to move upon masses of men. We have to 
teach social duty and impel to right social activities. No 
force for improvement will be most effective in the im- 
mediate future, or, apparently, in the long future, that is 
not a genuine social force. Such is our young minister's 
world, and it cannot be changed for him. He will find 
himself where theories or gospels that do not go beyond 
individualism fail to do the work that he desires to see 
accomplished. He must have a social message, a word 
and service of social effectiveness, or fail. 

This is one fact: the other is that, far more than we 
have perceived, the message of Jesus Christ is a social 
message. This is no new word, but it is far more nearly 
new than it ought to be. In the days of individualism 
we have taught about personal salvation, separate experi- 
ence, and individual effort: not about these alone, but 
about these predominantly. We have insisted upon the 
duty of fellowship and helpfulness, but principally within 
the brotherhood. We have not come to full discernment 
of the social power that our Saviour placed in our hands. 
By and by we shall notice how little Jesus said about 

ii6 



THE YOUNG MINISTER'S OUTLOOK 

saving our own souls, in comparison with what he said 
about living in righteousness, love, and helpfulness toward 
men around us. Some day we shall take to heart what it 
would be for Christians to live in all the relations of hfe 
in the genuine spirit of Jesus, to help others to do the 
same, and to plan that all might be able to do the same at 
the best advantage. Some day we shall have visions of 
the church of Christ bending its best endeavors to this 
task; and some day we shall see the living church doing 
this. All questions of living together ought to be judged 
in the light of our Lord's principle and method of living 
together; and who should apply themselves to this work 
of judgment but those who love the Lord and bear his 
name? Yes, our young minister, if he well understands 
his gospel, may expect to develop a social message. He 
has the material for it. Out in the thick of life, it will 
come to him. All social betterment lies within his field. 

But human movement goes by reactions, and we must 
be on our guard. We have long had our gospel of indi- 
vidualism, and now there may easily be danger that a 
young minister may react away from it, in his zeal for his 
worthy social methods. Charles Kingsley, if I remember 
rightly, allowed himself to speak disparagingly of people 
who are seeking to save their own souls. I think he 
called them poor beggarly souls, and intimated that souls 
whose salvation was sought were scarcely worth saving. 
He was too good and too human a man to mean that, but 
he said something to that effect, and he so illustrated the 
reaction that I mean. Before us is a hard task, to recon- 
cile the individualism without which the gospel is of no 
effect, and the appeal of social duty that is long to be 
upon us. It is profoundly true that without a genuine 
individualism the gospel is dead. We may try to turn 
attention altogether to the social problems and the social 
duties, using those words in a broad sense, and leave the 
question of the individual's status out of sight. We may 

117 



IMMORTALITY: A STUDY OF BELIEF 

assume that if we stir the social impulse the individual 
relations and character will take care of themselves. We 
may assume this and act upon it, but if we do we shall 
be rebuked by the result. We shall find that we have 
been trying to make ideal members of society out of per- 
sons who have not the root of the matter in them. There 
is no substitute for a right personality, and there is no 
substitute for that good reality which our fathers called 
personal religion. You and I need to be set right in our 
higher relations, and held fast in the noble bonds of a 
divine fellowship: we need to be transformed into the 
likeness of Christ if we are to live among our fellows 
in that likeness : we need the redemptive w^ork to be 
wrought in us, if we are to take the place of redeemed 
men among men and hold it successfully for the common 
good. And so our young minister must blend with his 
social message a personal message which is much the 
same as that which generations before us have heard. 
You will not understand me to be setting the two parts 
of the one good over against each other in exclusive 
contrast: but speaking in the large it certainly is true 
that the personal experience and transformation is the 
stem on which the fruit of social power for good must 
grow. Sociology does not save. It cannot save the stu- 
dent of it, neither can it save society. Sociology is not 
salvation, any more than physiology is health. Health 
is fullness of life — and so is salvation, whether of a man 
or of mankind. And so the old individualism of the 
gospel is not to be disparaged or outgrown. It is to 
be maintained, and carried on to its rightful applications 
in the great social fellowship. 

Upon this I draw out another question. Doubtless 
it has been asked and answered in the young minister's 
experience, and yet it is so central to all true thoughts 
about his outlook that I am impelled to lead him to con- 
sider it again. We are in a new world ; a man must have 

ii8 



THE YOUNG MINISTER'S OUTLOOK 

a message ; his message must be social, while yet it never 
forsakes the Christian individualism: What then is the 
messaged What is the point? What is the ideal our 
young minister must set himself to seek? and what, 
from the nature of the ideal, would seem to he the chief 
reliance, the agency or force of greatest power? This 
group of questions I may ask as one. 

For doing the new work which is both individual and 
social, a man must have vision of his end, and true 
judgment as to means. Vision of the end will be enlight- 
ening as to the character of the means, and yet not even 
this will be so enlightening as to leave no place for wise 
discernment. Always must a man be alert for finding the 
right means, but first of all he needs to know what he is 
seeking to accomplish. What is it then? What will the 
vision show? 

I have spoken the word already, but not with full 
emphasis, and it must be uttered again. Fellowship with 
Christ, this is the end that a Christian minister seeks 
to fulfill. That human beings may come to think with 
Jesus, to love with Jesus, to judge with Jesus, to act Hke 
Jesus, on all subjects, in all relations, and in every part 
of life — this is the end in view. Perhaps we have not 
set our aim in so simple and clear a light as this, but this 
is what it is. Jesus Christ is to us the expression of the 
living God and of all right Hf e and being : he is the avail- 
able representation of the eternal goodness. In propor- 
tion as his mind is breathed into us and becomes our 
characteristic, we are right in the ruling principle of life ; 
and the Christian endeavor has for its aim and end the 
bringing of all men and all life into this moral and spirit- 
ual fellowship with Jesus Christ. When souls think of 
God as Jesus thought of him and feel toward him as 
Jesus felt; when men live with God as Jesus lived with 
his Father in the spirit and power of religion; when 
neighbors live with neighbors and friends with friends 

119 



IMMORTALITY: A STUDY OF BELIEF 

under the influence of the mind and character that we 
know in Jesus ; when the world's business is done accord- 
ing to the mind of Jesus ; when the nations are governed 
in the light of his principles; when class and class, rich 
and poor, labor and capital, nation and nation, act toward 
one another in fellowship with his heart and judgment; 
when questions as they arise are decided in his way, and 
the large movements of the masses of humanity proceed 
in fellowship with the desire of Jesus concerning human 
affairs; — then will have been fulfilled the purpose to 
which our young minister is devoting his life, — and not 
till then. Into the judgments that are thus proposed 
fanaticism need not enter. Applications of the mind of 
Jesus to facts as they appear will not be always easy, 
but the main idea is clear. The minister of Christ gives 
his life to produce in men religiousness in the Christian 
sense, righteousness in common life, love toward men 
with its helpfulness, and brotherly and intelligent applica- 
tion of these to the whole of life. When we are in fellow- 
ship with Christ we shall be in fellowship with God, and 
when we are in fellowship with God we shall be right. 
Fellowship with the Father and with his Son Jesus Christ 
is a sufficient guide, when once we know how to follow it, 
to all success in all parts and kinds of human existence. 
Any work in life that cannot be brought into this fellow- 
ship is not worthy of a man; and there is no virtue or 
grace or holy work, for individual or for multitude, that 
is not an act of fellowship with Christ, and with God 
whom we know in Christ. 

How noble and winning a vision ! How simple is the 
principle, how glorious the effect ! Let us bow our heads 
in gratitude, that we are permitted to devote our lives, 
in word and deed, in thought and labor, for the accom- 
plishing of so simple and high an end. 

The nature of the vision determines some things, as to 
the character of the means upon which our young minis- 

120 



THE YOUNG MINISTER'S OUTLOOK 

ter, seeking this end, must place his main reHance. Much 
may be done, no doubt, by comparative indirection : much 
may be truly accomplished by means that do not go to 
the heart of the matter. Such efforts, and their results, 
are to be thankfully welcomed, so far as they go. But 
for bringing men, and life, and society, into the righteous 
and gracious fellowship of Jesus Christ, there are some 
agencies that are not central, and cannot be relied upon 
as the chief. Social activities by way of reform, taken 
by themselves, cannot be the central means, for they need 
inspiring with the mind of Christ before they can fully 
attain to the end. Nonreligious philanthropies are good, 
and useful, and will not fail to bear their part in the 
betterment of the world, but it is plain that they lack 
something that is yet to be desired. No, these are not 
the main reliance, nor can they be. There is no substitute 
for religion. The vision tells us so. The mind of Jesus 
Christ, with which we seek to bring men into fellowship, 
was first of all a religious mind. If there had been no 
Father's face for him to look up into, Jesus Christ would 
have been impossible, and there would have been no mind 
of Christ to draw us into fellowship with itself. In fel- 
lowship with Jesus, religiousness is primary. It is the 
uplifting, transforming, motive-yielding element. It is 
the element that makes all the rest new. And so the 
young minister looks out into a work in which religion, 
or life in close fellowship of heart and will with God, is 
the main agency and the main reliance for success. He 
must be religious himself, and religion must give charac- 
ter to his appeals to men, and religiousness in the men 
whom he influences must be his chief reliance for bring- 
ing them into the richly various good life to which he 
seeks to lead them. 

So the young minister will discover, sooner or later, 
that he needs to be himself a religious man. That, I 
know, is not the easiest thing to define, and one may pic- 

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ture religiousness in old and familiar forms, while an- 
other conceives it in some more modern manner. In 
many forms indeed it may legitimately be manifested, 
and I offer no counsel that looks toward using shibboleth- 
questions and establishing narrow tests. But the inspira- 
tion of his life must be found in God, and in personal 
dealings of fellowship w4th God as he is known in Christ. 
A young man may react from pietism, as he may call it, 
and think that he can draw all the motives he needs from 
the work itself ; and so he may stir about in activities 
that move on the earthly level, and have no vital connec- 
tions for his soul above. But it will not do. He may 
not know that he needs more, but he does. Only what is 
born in heaven is powerful for heaven upon the earth. 
Only God in man can bring men to God. But there is no 
need of deep statements here, for even the most business- 
like formula of a minister's work proves the point. The 
man must be on the side to which he wishes to bring 
others. One who is seeking to make a more reHgious 
world must be religious. The reality of religion is the 
hope of the world, and without the reality of religion no 
man can count upon helping strongly in the fulfillment of 
that hope. 

By the same token his work must be religious. It is 
easy to say that the distinction between secular and reli- 
gious is antiquated now. I hope it may become so, but 
let us take pains not to abolish it in the wrong way. Do 
not bring the religious down, draw the secular up. Be- 
ware of supposing that the uniting of secular and reli- 
gious has yet been rightly made. The suggestion has 
arisen that all the secular is sacred now ; but the danger 
remains, that the secular will too much swallow up the 
sacred. The young minister's hope lies in a work that 
keeps religion unsecularized, and gives it the first place. 

After the insistence upon religion, another question 
comes at once to hand. Out of his recent thoughts a 

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THE YOUNG MINISTER'S OUTLOOK 

young minister asks me, What then is the vocation of 
theology f We have been studying it here three years, 
and it is not to he useless, surely. What is to be its func- 
tion in our future work? 

Yes, we teach theology, and we study it. Whether our 
schaols teach altogether the right things, I am by no 
means sure, though I know that in some matters our 
curriculum is right. Our successors, soon or late, may 
perhaps be able to adapt the teaching more closely to the 
need. Toward better adaptation we have been growing, 
for theology in our time has been changing, and is chang- 
ing still. It is growing simpler, less abstract and meta- 
physical, more direct and practical, more true to the 
spirit of religion. In all our schools of theology this 
healthful change has more or less been going on, and 
thus the study of theology has been advancing in fitness 
to be a young minister's genuine helper toward his work. 
Our Seminaries can make great improvement yet, in fit- 
ting men for the actual work that lies before them, but 
certainly they now give a young minister something that 
he should find no difficulty in using to great advantage. 
He asks, however, how he is to use it, and in what man- 
ner it is to serve him. 

It is the function of theology to clarify the message. 
The message that a man has to deliver needs to be clear, 
straightforward, self -evidencing. If it is a message in 
words, it needs to be thus clear in thought : if it is a 
message in work and service, it needs to be thus clear in 
motive. Theology is the clarifier of the Christian mes- 
sage, both in motive and in thought, for the minister's 
own mind and for the minds of the people whom he 
seeks to influence. It is the vocation of theology to put 
the central truths in the center, and help them to be 
dominant in practice. Theology, when it is rightly con- 
ceived and used, lets the first truths of religion have their 
way, and helps them to their opportunity. It clears away 

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impossible ideas, that may have come over from days 
when they were not impossible. It traces valid connec- 
tions of thought, and substitutes them for connections 
that fail. It thus gives the few supreme realities of 
Christianity their rightful place and their opportunity to 
make their own simple and glorious system about them- 
selves. It does this noble service to the minister himself, 
clarifying his message as nothing else can clarify it ; and 
this it does, or may be made to do, for the people to whom 
the message comes. A rightly made theology brings in 
simplicity of thought, and at the same time inspires sim- 
plicity, directness and power of motive. It is the minis- 
ter's helper in all good work. 

The young minister's outlook covers a period of grow- 
ing power for simplified and clarifying theology. We 
are getting out into the open, where vital thinking is 
welcome and every man may do his own. We shall 
always be truly indebted to the conservative impulse, 
which knows our inheritance is too precious to be squan- 
dered ; and the substance which we thus inherit and hold 
fast we shall turn to the uses of our new time with an 
eager heart. There will be theological controversies still 
in the opening period, and our young man will not live to 
see the day when they all are past. But this is one of the 
good things about beginning now, that theology can be 
a guiding light, an instrument of usefulness, an inspira- 
tion to the new works of the new days, as it never could 
before. 

And what about the Bible f for no account of the young 
minister's outlook would be complete that passed this 
question by. Are we to have a Bible hereafter? of what 
use is it to be to us? and how are we to use it? What 
is the outlook as to the use and usefulness of the Bible? 

To which I answer, Do not worry about the Bible : use 
it. The outlook goes out into a period in which the min- 

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THE YOUNG MINISTER'S OUTLOOK 

ister will have a Bible to use, and will have a duty to put 
it to the high uses for which it has been prepared. 

In fact, this is in general one of the joys and glories 
of a minister's calling, that he is called not so much to 
establish truth or to discuss it, as to employ it for a high 
purpose. No man has achieved a full mastery of a truth 
as long as he is seeking to establish it, either for his own 
mind or for others : mastery has come only when he is 
able to wield it as an implement of power. Discussion, 
proof, removal of objections, may be necessary, but it 
is not the normal use of truth. I lately heard a sermon 
on Jeremiah's story of the potter and the clay, in which 
the preacher never alluded to the ancient uses of the 
scene, and never hinted that anyone had ever had the 
slightest trouble over the idea of the clay in the potter's 
hands, but simply went on and unfolded the true mean- 
ing, as if no other had ever been thought of. Wield the 
truth for a purpose, and you are using it aright. Put the 
Bible to its use as if its use had never been questioned, 
and it will not disappoint you, but will serve your highest 
end. 

The time has come for this, and for special emphasis 
upon this. The Bible has been under examination, and 
still remains so. Under all discussions of Christian the- 
ology has Iain the question what the Bible is, in what 
manner it teaches us truth ; and to this essential question 
the labor of modern students has been seeking a true 
answer. A true answer is gradually coming forth. There 
are many among us who have supposed that out of the 
inquiry would come forth settled doubt of the value of 
the Bible. How often are we warned that we shall be 
expected to tear out and throw away first one part of our 
Bible and then another, till we have none left ! In con- 
sequence, some men have been timid about using the 
Bible freely. Some have admitted the fancy that other 
writings were going to prove just as useful. Some have 

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IMMORTALITY: A STUDY OF BELIEF 

been influenced by the inequality that they found within 
the Bible, and have held back from confident resorting 
to it such as once they practiced. Yet somehow the Bible 
does not go. Its value has not departed. Examination 
is showing where the value of the Bible lies. Its power 
of ministering to the religious life stands unchanged ; and 
it is time for us who believe in this incomparable reli- 
gious value to testify to our confidence by freely putting 
the Bible to religious use. Take up the book of Jonah, 
and allow it to utter its great religious lesson, perhaps the 
highest thought of God that the Old Testament contains 
— a lesson concealed by age-long talk about the whale. 
Make the book speak at last with its true voice and bring 
its own revelation. So everywhere: learn the deep les- 
son, hear the voice of God in spiritual truth, and fear- 
lessly turn the Bible now to its full religious use. The 
time has come for this. Reliance upon the old external 
witness for the Bible has yielded to better evidence of 
its abiding value. The inspiration that commends it is 
internal, not external. Make the Bible speak, to your 
own soul and to your listening people, with its own voice 
of divine reality. Be led by it into deeper life, and use 
it to bring others there : it will not disappoint you. You 
will be using it as your fathers did not use it; but never 
suspect that there must be loss of religious power, and 
you will find no loss. Only bring out the religious value 
that exists. Show that the value is there, by using it. 
Put your Bible to this highest test, and you will be glad 
that you ventured on such confidence. 

I have fallen to exhorting my young minister ; but it is 
only in order that I might show him his real outlook. His 
Bible is not perishing out from his hands. He must let 
the discussion go on, never wishing it to cease; he must 
keep along with knowledge of it as it goes ; but he must 
know so well the religious value of the book that he shall 
never cease to be using it for the highest purposes, and 

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THE YOUNG MINISTER'S OUTLOOK 

never doubt its virtue in his work. His outlook covers 
a region of the future in which this will be the right way. 

One question remains upon which a word must be 
spoken. My very title carries the promise of such a 
word. I have been speaking of the young minister's work 
in its newness and greatness, in its social aspects and in 
its religious character. Any fair view of it is fatal to 
easy light-heartedness as one moves on into it. It is a 
work of deep joy, but of unfathomable seriousness also. 
How favorable are the conditionsf I may be asked. 
What is the outlook with regard to helps and hindrances? 
What of the night, and what of the morning? Is the age 
helpful? Is there a reasonable basis for courage in the 
general character of the atmosphere of our time? This 
every young minister needs to know, and has a right to 
ask, for it is important that one be able to judge how 
much is against him and how much is on his side. 

It is too hard a question to be answered in a word. 
Any short answer to it would be half true and half false. 
A true judgment will jump neither at optimistic hope nor 
at pessimistic discouragement. 

Reaching out into the future are many influences 
strongly favorable to the young minister's work. Our 
age, with all its faults, has developed strong moral inter- 
est. The ethical sense has certainly been growing: it is 
still imperfect in deplorable degree, and in need of 
strengthening and guiding, but it is real, and it is increas- 
ing. There is such a thing as a public conscience, and 
every day is coming to be a day of judgment to deeds that 
are wrought in the face of mankind. That makes, just 
so far, a good world to work in, and the minister misses 
his opportunity who does not take comfort from this fact 
and use it constantly as a help. Our age is insistent also, 
respecting religion, that if it be anything it be real. *The 
day" is already declaring whether the works of men who 
claim the name of Christ shall stand or are fit only to be 

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IMMORTALITY: A STUDY OF BELIEF 

burnt. Blindly enough, it is true, and often with stum- 
bling judgment, the world is moving on toward the land 
of genuineness. It respects no religious voice that rings 
hollow: it damns hypocrisy. And we may thankfully 
add, the world in our time has deep and honest reverence 
for Jesus Christ, and is coming more and more to think 
of God as Jesus revealed him. Faulty indeed is the 
discernment of the world when its Lord stands forth to 
view, and yet I need not dwell upon the well-known and 
welcome fact that the one commanding figure upon the 
field of life today is the figure of Jesus. One who says 
the right things about him will strike in among confirming 
judgments in the general mind; and so will one who says 
about God such things as Jesus said. Moreover, the 
spirit of human helpfulness has experienced a large 
awakening. It is immeasurably far from having the field 
to itself, and its presence only accentuates the sharpness 
of human selfishness that is abroad : but the helpful spirit 
is doing innumerable works for the common good, and 
in this, just so far, there is fellowship with the mind of 
Christ. And in the modern enlargement of thought, in 
the growth of mutual acquaintance among men, in the 
employment of more rational methods in thought than 
were formerly current, in the expectation of the age that 
new things will of course be presented to the mind — in 
all this there is much that calls welcomingly to our young 
minister as he turns his face outward to his field. It 
ought to be an irrepressible necessity of the Christian 
heart to recognize all congenial and helpful influences, 
and make the most of them. This has not always been 
done, but we shall be unpardonable now if we call friends 
enemies. There is very much in the times to render the 
young minister's outlook hopeful. 

It would be pleasant to stop here, and leave the outlook 
clear in helpfulness, but no one imagines that to be pos- 
sible. To call the age on the whole helpful to the minis- 

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THE YOUNG MINISTER'S OUTLOOK 

ter's work would be to speak untruly. I cannot in a brief 
moment tell all that this means, or even gather the main 
facts together. I can only show where some dark places 
in the outlook lie. We all know that the present is a 
rushing, whirling time, a time of swift and interesting 
change. It is a day of new things, and of new things that 
charm but grow quickly old. It is a time that dazzles 
with largeness. It is a time of keen devotion to material 
interests, a day of ambitions, an era of eagerness. It is 
generally understood among the people that religion is 
not what it used to be, and so it is assumed by many that 
it is nothing at all. Attention fastens upon things that 
perish with the using, and the things unseen and eternal 
are easily forgotten. This indictment does not tell all 
that is true about the age, but what it tells is true, and in 
such an atmosphere, however modified by its better quali- 
ties, the young minister is to live and do his work. 

Now a minister, if he is what he ought to be, is a man 
who takes his life and calling seriously : that is to say, he 
takes religion seriously. It is his aim that religion shall 
do its real work, and to this he is devoted. The form in 
which he takes religion seriously may be old or new ; but 
he believes in the living God, and in bringing the saving 
and transforming power of God into this present life, 
without delay. But the world about him does not take 
religion seriously in great degree, and is not anxious to 
do so. This does not mean merely that the present world 
revolts from old forms of doctrine, or has ceased to enjoy 
old modes of worship : it means that this present world 
is not seriously endeavoring, or consenting, to take the 
holy God and his will into its life and be transformed by 
him in its doings. Neither salvation from sin by the 
grace of God, nor resemblance in life to the holiness and 
love of God, is taken seriously, in the large, as an object 
of aspiration, prayer, and endeavor. What I said about 
the growing ethical sense is true, and yet the people in 

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IMMORTALITY: A STUDY OF BELIEF 

whom that ethical sense is growing have not reached the 
point of yielding to it. They apply it to one another, 
but not so much yet to themselves. And religion demands 
that they apply it to themselves, and learn thus their evil, 
and open their hearts to God who will transform them. 
The ''hard sayings" of Christianity, recognized as such, 
were once doctrinal. It is not so long since they were 
mainly so, and so to some extent, and in some quarters, 
they still continue. But the day of that is rapidly passing, 
and now the hard sayings of Christianity are mainly — as 
your own Dr. Tucker reminded us in an address the other 
day — ethical. There is a vast amount of honesty in the 
world, and of purity, and of justice, and of unselfishness : 
and yet go and insist steadily that society take honesty 
seriously, and purity, and justice, and unselfishness, and 
that society steadily work out its schemes of life, private 
and public, under the instruction of those godlike graces, 
and you will soon learn what the hard sayings are. It is 
true that this is nothing new, but that is just the point: 
it is the same old story, this is a sinful world. It is a sin- 
ful world with much good in it, but it is a sinful world ; 
and in such a world the minister's outlook lies. If any- 
one expects that the spirit of the age is to bear him up 
in genuine religious service, and make it easy for him, 
he is doomed to disappointment. If anyone harbors the 
thought that all is coming his way because he has modern 
ideas in religion, he will discover his mistake. Some very 
ancient things are still true. The work of God in the 
world is still a work against great difficulties. The age 
brings its helps, but it offers also its great obstacles. In 
every quarter, helps and obstacles lie side by side. One 
quarter in which the young minister who understands his 
calling will find his greatest helps and obstacles is the 
church itself. Here he will meet the men and women of 
insight and consecration, souls that discern the need and 
are ready with their lives; and here, of course, in the 

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THE YOUNG MINISTER'S OUTLOOK 

church, he will have his platform, his standing-ground, 
his opportunity. The church will be the living organism 
through which go forth the energy and effort that God 
uses him to inspire. But the church as a whole, or any 
church whatever, is very far from being now the body of 
Christ, the quick-living organism that responds to Christ's 
indwelling will as the body of the trained athlete answers 
to the command that he lays upon it. The church is not 
largely awakened to the necessities of the new time. The 
church has not perceived that the age of individualism is 
passing into a larger and more significant day. The 
church still holds self-edification as the chief end; and 
to hold to self-edification in a time when the deepest heart 
suggests service and self-sacrifice is to lose the point of 
edification itself, and fail between two conceivable suc- 
cesses. The young minister's outlook stretches out over 
a period in which, not altogether but in part, he will be 
required to awaken the interest of his natural allies and 
helpers, and train them to a work the need of which they 
have not yet clearly perceived. 

Why picture such an outlook ? Why not let the young 
man think the age is with him ? Because that would prob- 
ably result in his being with the age. A man who goes 
out under Christ's name expecting harmony between him- 
self and the surrounding world will find it, for it will 
exist: but the lone man will simply have made the vote 
unanimous. What would you have ? When did the good 
cause ever have an easy course? When did right and 
wrong ever live together without conflict, or Saint George 
and the dragon meet without need of a sword? Prophets, 
apostles, and the Lord himself have done battle. What 
would you have? It is hard work, and that is the glory 
of it — hard work for the best. 

I shall end with commonplaces, after all, if what I end 
with be conceived in terms of thought and language only. 
But, thank God, what we call commonplaces in religion 

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IMMORTALITY: A STUDY OF BELIEF 

are such only in the world of talk. In that realm, great 
matters have grown familiar, and we think we under- 
stand them and are ready to turn to something else ; but 
in the realm of life and doing they abide fresh and vital 
still. Language may weary us, but in real life nothing 
vital in religion is worn out. It is a commonplace to say 
that in the work of which we are thinking a man draws 
his inspirations from above. The resistance to his highest 
effort is on the plane of this world. His foe is human 
evil, but his strength is in the power of God. It is a com- 
monplace to say this, but the experience of it has never 
become commonplace, outworn, or too familiar. The 
great servants of God have illustrated it : the average ser- 
vants of God have done the same, and may do it still. 
Still from above does genuine power descend, upon the 
soul that can receive it. The heavenly freshness still 
abides in the toilsome work of the Christian ministry. 

If for a moment I may send back the voice of one who 
is far along the road, let me say that never for an hour 
have I ceased to be glad and thankful that this way lay 
my journey. I have always praised God, and praise him 
still, for the calling of a Christian minister ; and so I send 
back the greeting of gladness and hope to those who come 
after. The calling is worthy of the best men. Only the 
best men ought to enter it. For the best men it offers 
today an opportunity of useful service unsurpassed upon 
the great field of the world. May God bring into it all 
who ought to come, and no other, and make them manly 
helpers to their fellows in the name of Christ. 



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